What Is This Film Called Love?

What Is This Film Called Love? unfolds across a 77-minute run time as a thoughtful, poetic look at what happiness can mean. Mark Cousins arranges a series of reflective fragments, pairing brief observations with images that linger, and moves from small daily pleasures to broader ideas about longing and companionship. The film rejects a tidy argument, favoring mood and impression over plot, so it feels more like a conversation or a written essay given cinematic form. Scenes and lines accumulate rather than resolve, inviting you to consider how memory, art and simple moments can shape a sense of love and contentment.

Released in 2012, the film was conceived, written and directed by Mark Cousins, the filmmaker known for personal, essayistic documentaries. This piece is an original work rather than an adaptation, continuing his interest in cinema as a vehicle for intimate reflection.

It screened on the festival circuit and received limited art-house distribution, aimed at cinephile audiences. Public box office totals were not widely reported, which aligns with its modest theatrical exposure and niche programming rather than mainstream commercial release.

Among film students, festival programmers and cinephile communities the film reinforced Cousins' reputation for personal essay films, prompting dialogue about how cinematic form can engage everyday emotions. Its influence is clearest in classroom screenings, curated retrospectives and discussions that value image-driven, contemplative approaches to telling personal ideas about love.

Reaction was mixed to positive, with some viewers appreciating its lyrical, meditative tone and others wishing for firmer structure. Critics and audiences noted recurring themes of memory, intimacy, desire and the capacity of images to evoke feeling, framing the work as an impressionistic inquiry into happiness rather than a conventional documentary study.