Celebrating Cinema

For forty years, Tom Cruise has sold us one thing: a man who will not stop running. In Digger (2026), Alejandro G. Iñárritu casts him as an oil tycoon in prosthetics, only for the trailer to remind us of every Tom Cruise who came before. What happens when the ultimate movie star tries to disappear into a role?

Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom take Digger as a starting point to ask whether a movie star can ever truly play against type, or whether the persona is always visible beneath the performance. From Henry Fonda turning killer in Once Upon a Time in the West to Adam Sandler unravelling in Punch-Drunk Love, they explore why some of the most revealing performances happen when actors push against the image we already have of them. And what happens when Jesse Plemons walks into Digger and threatens to steal the show?

A follow-up to our earlier episode asking whether Tom Cruise could save cinema. The first half is spoiler-free. The alarm sounds at 18:01.

Tell us how you'd rate it. We can't decide.

Get tickets to Digger @ LAB111

Get tickets to Shall We Dance? (Ballroom Dancing Workshop) @ LAB111

Get tickets to Film and Food: Do The Right Thing @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

From Paul Verhoeven to Hoyte van Hoytema to Halina Reijn, Dutch filmmakers have made a mark far beyond the Netherlands. But why doesn’t Dutch cinema travel as far as the talent it produces?

For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Celebrating Cinema host Elliot Bloom speaks with actor Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, director Mees Peijnenburg and producer Leontine Petit, who co-produced the Oscar-nominated Brazilian film The Secret Agent.

Together, they discuss what Dutch cinema gains from international collaboration, why homegrown films struggle to find audiences, and the tension between making films for the Dutch market and competing internationally. What would it take to build a Dutch cinema that can connect at home and travel abroad?

For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Kiriko Mechanicus meets two rising Dutch filmmakers who use cinema to get closer to people and histories — and to find out what lies beyond what they already know.

Amanda van Hesteren's Dagen met Blue is built around the trust between filmmaker and subject. Kiriko chats to Amanda about her fascination with people in all their colours, how she creates the space for Blue to open up, and what she can learn about someone by spending enough time with them to look beyond the version of themselves they show the world.

In Bagasi – wat we meedragen, Emma Lesuis investigates her family's colonial history in Suriname. By combining documentary and theatre, Emma finds a way into a history that runs through both the colonised and the coloniser in her own family and, in the process, comes to see that history differently.

Sometimes, you have to make the film to understand what you're actually looking at.

Watch Dagen Met Blue @ NFF

Watch Bagasi on NPO

How did 9/11 change Hollywood and when does entertainment become propaganda?

Marking 25 years since 9/11 and coinciding with LAB111’s Manufacturing Consent programme, Elliot Bloom and film critic Hugo Emmerzael trace cinema’s long relationship with propaganda and political power. From revolutionary montage and The Battle of Algiers to Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty and Iron Man, they look at how wars are sold, enemies invented and ideology turned into entertainment.

At the centre of the conversation is the profound shift in American cinema after 9/11, when the War on Terror became embedded in Hollywood storytelling and spectacle. Elliot and Hugo unpack why propaganda rarely announces itself as propaganda, and how the films we watch can shape whose stories we believe, whose violence we accept and who gets cast as the enemy.

Get tickets to Manufacturing Consent @ LAB111

Get tickets to Film Lecture: Cinematic Ghosts of 9/11 @ LAB111

Get tickets to Akira @ LAB111

Get tickets to Film & Food series @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

Thirty-five years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, cinema is still imagining the end of the world through killer machines, nuclear war, viruses and alien invasions. But did one of the greatest blockbusters ever made teach us to imagine the apocalypse all wrong?

With Terminator 2 returning to our screens in 4K, producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus ask why cinema is so obsessed with watching the world end and why Hollywood tends to make collapse so spectacular. Through Children of Men, Idiocracy and Brazil, they look beyond the big cinematic apocalypse to the dystopias where life simply carries on.

From our need to give the things we fear a human face to our strange enjoyment of watching everything fall apart, the conversation explores what these imagined futures reveal about the world we already live in. And whether dystopian cinema, rather than simply indulging our worst fears, might give us a way of imagining something different.

Get tickets to Terminator 2: Judgement Day @ LAB111

Get tickets to Akira @ LAB111

Get tickets to The Big Lebowski @ LAB111

“My mother and cinema are my two teachers in life, each in their own peculiar ways.”

Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus and producer Elliot Bloom explore the parallels between these two teachers: the women who raise us, and the films that show us how to live, love and understand the world.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary and re-release of Cría Cuervos, they look at a series of films from the 1970s — including Carrie, The Exorcist and Grey Gardens — in which the relationship between mothers and daughters becomes a way of thinking about changing ideas of womanhood, motherhood and what women are expected to be. At a time when those expectations were beginning to shift, these films capture some of the anxieties, desires and contradictions surrounding that change.

What do we inherit from our mothers? And what do we learn from cinema? Sometimes the two are not so different: both give us images of who we might become, what we might fear, and what we might choose to do differently.

Get tickets to Cría Cuervos @ LAB111

Get tickets to Mothers & Daughters @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

In 2007, the Coen Brothers made a thriller set in 1980 that somehow captured an American dread that hadn't fully arrived yet. Critic Hugo Emmerzael and academic Dan Hassler-Forest return to No Country for Old Men — the coin toss, the deaths that happen offscreen, the sheriff who solves nothing — to ask how a film everybody already loves quietly called the next twenty years.

Hugo and Dan get into the film's nihilism, its collapse of the Western hero and detective who restores order, and the strange afterlife of Javier Bardem's iconic Anton Chigurh: from Oscar winner to right-wing meme. JD Vance has even used Chigurh's monologue in a political speech, while Pete Hegseth apparently mistook Pulp Fiction for the Bible.

And what does No Country for Old Men have in common with Euphoria? What felt like a disturbing vision of a society emptied of values in 2007 can now feel less like a warning than a description of everyday life.

Get tickets to ⁠⁠Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠⁠ @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

We’re constantly told to slow down and be present, but what does it actually mean to pay attention when so much of modern life is designed to scatter it?

This summer, French auteur Jacques Tati returns to LAB111 in six newly restored 4K classics, including his magnum opus PlayTime. Few filmmakers have looked at modern life with Tati’s comic precision: traffic becomes choreography, bureaucracy becomes absurd theatre and the city itself becomes a machine for distraction.

Producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus explore attention, bureaucracy and urban life through Tati’s PlayTime, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Scorsese’s After Hours, looking at what happens when the structures of modern life become so consuming that we stop noticing the lives we’re actually living.

But if paying attention has become something we increasingly struggle to do, what should we make of films that turn it into a virtue? In Perfect Days, is noticing the world a genuine alternative to modern life — or are we fetishising attention itself?

Get tickets to It's Cinema! The Films of Jacques Tati @ LAB111

Get tickets to After Hours @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠ @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

What makes a film camp? Is it something filmmakers create, or something audiences discover?

To celebrate Pride Month and LAB111's Camp, Cult & Queer programme, filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by film programmer Alicia Bergamelli to unpack one of cinema's most elusive ideas. Drawing on Susan Sontag's famous essay Notes on "Camp", they explore where camp came from, why it has become inseparable from queer culture, and how audiences can completely reshape a film's meaning over time.

Through films including Bound, Cruising, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, they discuss the difference between intentional and accidental camp, why works once dismissed or condemned can become beloved classics, and what these changing reputations reveal about cinema, identity and the communities that keep films alive.

Get tickets to Camp Cult & Queer @ LAB111

Get tickets to Y Tu Mama Tambien @ LAB111

Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111

Get tickets to The Departed @ LAB111

Who gets to tell a story? And who gets to see themselves reflected on screen?

Sixty years after its release, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (La Noire de..., 1966) remains one of the defining works of African cinema. Restored in 4K and re-released by Odyssey Classics for its anniversary, Sembène's groundbreaking debut follows Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who travels to France believing she's beginning a new life, only to find herself trapped within the lingering structures of colonial power.

Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by filmmaker and archivist Djeneba Saccoh to discuss why Black Girl still feels so vital today. Together they unpack the quiet resistance woven through the film—from Diouana's inner monologue to the carved mask that passes between worlds.

From there, Kiriko and Djeneba trace the film's influence through Mati Diop's Dahomey to Souleymane Cissé's Den Muso, exploring how filmmakers across generations have continued to grapple with questions of representation, power and who gets to tell their own story.

New to Ousmane Sembène? We recommend listening to our companion interview with his son, Alain Sembène, in which producer Elliot Bloom explores the life, philosophy and legacy of the filmmaker often described as the father of African cinema.

Get tickets to Black Girl @ LAB111

Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠ @ LAB111