Celebrating Cinema

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1. Why Does Hollywood Love Remaking Foreign Films?

   22 oktober 2026 · 41 min

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   Hollywood loves a remake. But why take a film that already works and make it all over again? Host Laura Gommans sits down with LAB111’s Head of Cinema, Tom Ooms, to dig into Hollywood’s habit of reworking films from around the world and what happens when it gets its hands on someone else’s story. Lees meer

   From Masayuki Suô’s Shall We Dance? and its Richard Gere-starring remake to Funny Games, The Vanishing and Force Majeure, they look at the changes that can turn a film into something completely different. There are American happy endings, cultural misunderstandings and the occasional remake that becomes a classic in its own right, as with Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, adapted from Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs.

   With Odyssey Classics re-releasing the original Japanese Shall We Dance?, it’s a good moment to consider Hollywood’s never-ending impulse to remake the world in its own image.

   Get tickets to Shall We Dance? @ LAB111

   Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Under The Skin @ LAB111

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

2. Rodrigo Sorogoyen on The Beloved: Can Cinema Heal Us?

   20 oktober 2026 · 31 min

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   What can cinema really fix? In The Beloved, Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts, Mother) explores the complicated relationship between a powerful film director and his estranged daughter, using the filmmaking process itself to examine questions of identity, domination and abandonment. Lees meer

   In conversation with film critic Hugo Emmerzael, Sorogoyen discusses turning the camera on cinema itself, experimenting with different visual languages, and creating a film within a film inspired by the work of Terrence Malick. He also reflects on his recurring interest in toxic masculinity, his collaboration with screenwriter Isabel Peña, and the personal experiences of fatherhood, loss and family history that shaped The Beloved.

   Can art repair what life has broken? For Sorogoyen, cinema might not fix everything, but it can help us understand ourselves, and each other, a little better.

   Get tickets to The Beloved @ LAB111

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

3. Cine Of The Times | Walk Hard Should Have Killed The Musical Biopic

   15 oktober 2026 · 47 min

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   In 2007, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story tore the music biopic apart so thoroughly that Hollywood should never have been able to make one with a straight face again. It flopped. Since then, we’ve had Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Elvis and, this year, Michael. So what went wrong? Lees meer

   For the latest Cine of the Times, film critic Hugo Emmerzael and media scholar Dan Hassler-Forest revisit Jake Kasdan’s merciless parody to figure out why the music biopic refuses to die. They get into how much of the supposedly "true" story never actually happened, the difference between inhabiting a star and simply imitating one, and John C. Reilly’s commitment to playing every absurd cliché completely straight. They also ask what happens when the music industry turns its back catalogue into algorithm-friendly jukebox movies.

   Recorded again online after the producer lost the first take.

   Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story @ LAB111.

   Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Under the Skin @ LAB111.

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

4. Digger: Can Tom Cruise Ever Stop Being Tom Cruise?

   8 oktober 2026 · 40 min

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   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? Lees meer

   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.

5. Why Is Dutch Cinema Struggling to Find Its Audience?

   2 oktober 2026 · 36 min

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   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? Lees meer

   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?

6. Can Cinema Show Us What We Can’t See? — NFF Special w/ Amanda van Hesteren & Emma Lesuis

   29 september 2026 · 55 min

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   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. Lees meer

   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

7. Manufacturing Consent: How 9/11 Changed Hollywood

   10 september 2026 · 55 min

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

   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.

8. Did Terminator 2 Ruin How We Imagine The End Of The World?

   4 september 2026 · 47 min

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   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? Lees meer

   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

9. Why Is Cinema Just Like My Mother?

   20 augustus 2026 · 52 min

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

   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.

10. Cine Of The Times: Did No Country For Old Men Predict Trump’s America?

    13 augustus 2026 · 46 min

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    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. Lees meer

    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.

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