Celebrating Cinema

Once proclaimed the most beautiful boy in the world by Italian director Luchino Visconti, former teen star Björn Andrésen has forever been marked by this and what followed after starring as Tadzio in Visconti's Death in Venice (1971). Speaking with Elliot, Björn candidly shares what it was like to revisit these experiences during the filming of the newly released documentary The Most Beautiful Boy In The World (Kristina Lindström & Kristian Petri, 2021).

A teenage girl discovers an egg that starts to hatch... 

Finnish director Hanna Bergholm joins Hugo to discuss her gripping feature debut Hatching (2022), which made its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2022. This body-horror, coming-of-age drama certainly packs a punch. From 70s horror films to working with the best animatronic designer out there, find out Hanna's journey to creating this thrilling debut.

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL." It's about time we celebrated one of the greatest films in cinema - Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Kubrick’s dazzling, Academy Award-winning achievement is a compelling drama of man vs. machine, a stunning meld of music and motion, but what's the deal? Why is this film a timeless classic? Here to try make sense of it all, we discuss what this film means to each of us and how it's shaped our perspective of film and science fiction cinema.

Back for season 2 and here to grace you with a two hour special all about writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson! Licorice Pizza (2021) has finally hit screens, so it's only right we take a look back at his career. PTA certainly has an obsession with co-dependent relationships, creating sympathy for unruly characters, and a true connoisseur of fuck boys but does it always pay off?

With Paul Schrader's must-read book Transcendental Style In Film - suggested by director Viktor van der Valk - as a stepping stone for the last Celebrating Cinema podcast of 2021, our hosts discuss the different varieties of transcendental filmmaking and the way it impacts us as viewers. They talk about their film club pick, Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), and mention essential filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman, Yasujiro Ozu, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Terrence Malick. Where do you find yourself near the Tarkovsky Ring...?

With both the festive season upon us and new restrictions imposed on cinemas, the mack is back and we're here to discuss our cinema comforts! We discuss our chicken-soup films that we watch religiously, as well as try to determine the common themes tying our movie choices that can reveal what we find comforting about our picks.

It’s about time we absolve ourselves of the guilt we feel when enjoying our personal favourites! Writer Basje Boer joins us again to discuss why we should be liberated from the stigma of loving overtly shlocky action films, non-sensical comedies, and schmaltzy teen dramas and romcoms. We question what exactly we are suppose to feel guilty of and how this can limit your own unique love of cinema.

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We want to know what your supposed “guilty pleasures”! Send them in to [email protected] with a brief description of why you love your selected film and what makes you feel “guilty” about loving it.

With the release of their feature debut Gagarine (2020) in cinemas here in The Netherlands, we spoke with directors Fanny Liatard & Jérémy Trouilh to discuss the duality of Paris captured on screen. We explore how their magic-realist drama bridges the tensions between the romanticised dreamlike city and its neglected suburbs, united by a universal ability to dream and the importance of utopian images.

Special thanks to Cinéarte for organising this episode.

To “celebrate” the release of Clint Eastwood’s latest film Cry Macho and maybe his final swan song, Hugo & Tom get together to discuss their very different relationships to this Hollywood 'icon'. On the surface this may appear to be a review of one man's career in film, but perhaps it reveals something about our own attitude to cinema. Is this the Clint Eastwood spin-off show Hugo has always wanted...?

In conjunction with the upcoming Camera Japan Festival at LAB111, a celebration of upcoming and contemporary Japanese films, we explore our own personal relationship to what Japanese cinema offers. The wealth of Japanese films are too rich to ever justly cover in a single episode, so instead we are joined by programmer and researcher of Japanese cinema Julian Ross, to explore an overlooked genre of Japanese film - Expanded Cinema, a radical form that subverts our understanding of what cinema can be and the audience's relationship to the screen.