Celebrating Cinema

Some filmmakers don't just make great films, they change who cinema is for.

60 years ago, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (La Noire de...) announced a new cinematic voice to the world. Through the story of a young Senegalese woman working for a French family, Sembène exposed the brutal realities of colonialism while proving that African stories could—and should—be told on their own terms.

To mark the film's 60th anniversary, producer Elliot Bloom speaks with Alain Sembène, the filmmaker's son, about the remarkable life and philosophy behind one of cinema's true pioneers.

Together, they discuss why Sembène turned from literature to filmmaking, why he believed cinema could become "the people's night school," and how he dedicated his career to challenging audiences to question the systems that shape their lives.

Get tickets to Black Girl @ 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.

Why are journeys one of cinema's defining storytelling forms?

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings one of literature's greatest journeys to the screen. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms discuss whether the film succeeds as an epic, why Nolan's obsession with IMAX shapes the experience as much as the storytelling, and whether a cast this famous ever lets the world of the film feel fully inhabited.

They also introduce LAB111's new season of quests, exiles and homecomings, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Beau Is Afraid to The Seventh Seal, asking what these films reveal about why cinema returns to stories of people searching for a place to belong.

Get tickets to The Odyssey @ LAB111

Get tickets to It's Not The Destination, It's The Journey @ 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.

Do ratings help us discover great films or have they quietly changed the way we watch?

Before you've even bought a ticket, you probably know the Letterboxd average, the IMDb score or the Rotten Tomatoes percentage. Somewhere between the opening scene and the closing credits, many of us are already deciding on a number of our own.

Laura Gommans is joined by producer Elliot Bloom to discuss what ratings have done to film culture. From an IMDb Top 250 that barely changes to Rotten Tomatoes' aggregate scores, they explore how audience opinion shapes everything from blockbuster filmmaking to the rise of safe, audience-tested stars, and why the best films rarely fit neatly into a number.

Get tickets to ⁠Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader⁠ @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Late⁠x @ LAB111

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

The Watermelon Woman (1996) was Cheryl Dunye's debut and the first American feature directed by a Black lesbian. A film that slips between video-store romance and a forged archive, asking who gets recorded by cinema and who gets written out of it. Thirty years on, it has been restored, added to the Criterion Collection, and, for the very first time, released in Dutch cinemas.

Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by Justine Knijn, distributor at Eye Filmmuseum and the person bringing the film to the Netherlands. They get into the film's faked documentary structure and its late reveal; the 1996 sex scene that drew conservative backlash over its tiny public budget; and the satire of academia.

A conversation about lesbian film history, restoration, and the long afterlife of films the industry tried to forget and a case for a mainstream gay summer.

Get tickets to ⁠⁠The Watermelon Woman @ LAB111

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

Get tickets to ⁠⁠Fight The Power: Palestine 36 @ LAB111

Get tickets to Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader @ LAB111

Get tickets to Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Latex @ LAB111

🎧 New episodes weekly. Leave a review to help more people find us.

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

Nobody has ever filmed a real alien, so why do they all look the same? The grey skin, the black almond eyes, sixty years running.

This week Laura Gommans is joined by historian Alexander Bartels, who curated LAB111's We Are Not Alone season, for a conversation about the gap between the aliens cinema gives us and the things people actually report seeing. On screen: greys, flying saucers, humanoid visitors. From the real records that Bartels studies: declassified military footage, radar data, government files from around the world there are mostly orbs and lights, unspectacular and almost impossible to film. So where did the grey come from? They follow the loop back to one telling case: The Bellero Shield, an episode of The Outer Limits that aired in February 1964, twelve days before Barney Hill, under hypnosis, drew the wrap-around-eyed alien that matched it almost exactly.

Screen and sighting have been copying each other ever since, right up to a 2024 Pentagon report that blames film and television for what people believe they've seen. Has cinema ever shown us something genuinely other, or only ever redrawn ourselves?

Get tickets to ⁠Disclosure Day⁠ @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠We Are Not Alone⁠ @ LAB111

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

Steven Spielberg spent fifty years teaching us to look up. When the Pentagon released its real alien files, nobody blinked. His new film Disclosure Day marks the day the truth finally lands — this time his aliens look back at us, but the question is whether anyone still believes him.

Fresh from the Tuschinski premiere, Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom get into late Spielberg — shortcuts, or message over quality — empathy as the ruling emotion of the universe, and whether cinema's great sentimentalist can still earn the tears. One of them cried twice. The other counted seventy FBI agents with no peripheral vision.

With a voice note from BBC film critic Ali Plumb on the night Spielberg crashed his pub quiz, and a listener's hot take on thirty wet years of Spielberg's cinematographer Janusz Kamiński.

Spoilers from 18:06 — come back when you've seen it.

Get tickets to Disclosure Day @ LAB111

Get tickets to We Are Not Alone @ LAB111

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

The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) was a small film about Los Angeles street racers, immigrant car culture, and a cop who didn't want to be one. Twenty-five years on it's a seven-billion-dollar franchise where cars get launched into space and "family" is a marketing strategy. From Echo Park to outer space — what does that arc tell us about Hollywood?

This is the first part of Cine of the Times, a new monthly Celebrating Cinema strand. Each month, critic Hugo Emmerzael (Filmkrant, Locarno) and media studies scholar Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University) take one film from the century so far, ranging from arthouse to spectacular pulp. This month: the serialised blockbuster, the economics of the sequel, and how a street-racing B-movie became the template for the modern studio franchise.

Listen first. Then join us at LAB111 on Wednesday 17 June — curated clips, an extended introduction, and a post-screening discussion. Get your tickets here.

A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

Kane Parsons made the Backrooms on YouTube when he was only sixteen. Over 200 million views later, A24 has handed him his feature debut, making him the studio's youngest director ever at 20. But the yellow walls still don't end.

This week Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom go into the maze and come back with an answer that has very little to do with what's actually inside. The Backrooms, they argue, is about us, stuck in our own feedback loop, drifting through vacant spaces.

Online, half the internet thinks Kane Parsons couldn't have directed such a hit so young. Mark Duplass, who was on set the whole time, says they're wrong. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve carry the screen, with James Wan and Osgood Perkins producing. Laura and Elliot ask: what does it take to direct a feature like this at 20 with a crew this experienced? And has A24 found its next pipeline for talent — skipping film school for YouTube horror directors?

Get tickets to Backrooms @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠⁠Cine of The Times: The Fast And The Furious⁠⁠ @ LAB111

Get tickets to Straight To Video: Nightmare At Noon @ LAB111

A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has been sending dispatches from Cannes since 1999. If you ask him what's changed in 27 years, he claims: nothing. He means it as a compliment.

Hugo Emmerzael sits down with the legendary film critic on the Croisette mapping out Peter's journey through film, from his first memory of cinema through the strange, accidental route into one of the most-read critic chairs in the English-speaking press. They get into why only Cannes, among the major film festivals, still places film criticism at the heart of it all.

Plus five films that caught Peter's attention this year: Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur, Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland, Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Beloved, Marine Atlan's La Gradiva, and Clio Barnard's I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, and why we should value the politics inside the films rather than the statements and press conferences around them.

Get tickets to ⁠Cine of The Times: The Fast And The Furious⁠ @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠Moving incl. Ramen⁠ @ LAB111

Get tickets to ⁠Film Lecture: Everything Is Cinema - The Filmic Alchemy Of Jean-Luc Godard⁠ @ LAB111

A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

Long before phones turned every life into footage, a small line of filmmakers was already pointing the camera at themselves — not to perform, but to work out what a life was. This week, producer Elliot Bloom sits down with co-host Kiriko Mechanicus to talk about her new short documentary How To Catch A Butterfly — a first-person essay film that traces how ethnic fetishisation has shaped her relationships and sexual experiences as a Dutch-Japanese woman. The film had its world premiere at SXSW Documentary Short Competition 2026 and won the EMEL Short Film Grand Prize at Indie Lisboa.

Together they ask why we keep personal archives at all and what those archives teach us back, especially now, living through the most self-documented stretch of human history — through three landmarks of autobiographical documentary: Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (2003), Bing Liu's Minding The Gap (2018), and Tom Fassaert's A Family Affair (2015).

Plus: a hot take from one of our listeners on Michael , Antoine Fuqua's long-delayed Michael Jackson biopic, now in cinemas.

Related episodes: Documentary Ethics with Miriam Guttmann · 2000 Metres To Andriivka And Why We Need Documentary Films.