Set against the rise of Russia's authoritarian regime, filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya's How to Save a Dead Friend is an homage to both a silenced generation and to her lover and best friend Kimi. A whirlwind of emotion capturing the specific intimacy of an anxious youth, a relationship tellingly universal that brings hope still in death. Speaking with Hugo, Marusya reveals the toils and costs of making this deeply personal film — and what the camera gave her that nothing else could.
With Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning in cinemas, the question is serious: is Tom Cruise singlehandedly keeping alive a form of visceral, physical, risk-it-all cinema that the rest of Hollywood has abandoned? This episode places Cruise in a lineage of genuine movie stars — from Buster Keaton's physical bravado to the offscreen mythology that once made studios possible — and asks whether his commitment to the stunt, to the tangible, to the real, is an act of preservation or a beautiful last gesture before the format disappears entirely.
Timed to coincide with an Eye Filmmuseum retrospective and the return of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God to LAB111's screens, this episode takes on one of cinema's great obsessives. Werner Herzog's concept of ecstatic truth — the idea that cinema's job is not to document reality but to find the truth that lives beneath it — is the thread running through every rubber boat hauled over an Amazonian mountain, every conductor at the edge of collapse, every man who walked into a volcano. An episode about what it means to believe in cinema this completely.
Helena Castro, co-curator of the multidisciplinary film programme Witch Way Now at LAB111 and Paradiso, joins the podcast to trace the witch across a century of cinema — from Salem's fires to The Witch, from Sleeping Beauty to Suspiria. Is the witch a feminist icon, or is that claim too convenient? How has her image evolved from monstrous threat to liberated archetype, and what does cinema reveal about representation when a figure this loaded changes hands across generations? An episode at the intersection of genre, politics, and the question of who gets to tell the story of the outcast.
The final episode in the Future Frames series brings two filmmakers into genuine conversation. Kiriko Mechanicus speaks with Razan Hassan — recent winner of Best Documentary at the Shortcutz Film Festival — about her teenage encounter with Bernardo Bertolucci, the depths of the Syrian new wave, and the relationship between pain and the urgent need to make something. Hassan's upcoming film On the Edge of Life I Saw a Film is already drawing attention. A conversation about where the images come from when the world gives you every reason to look away.
Amira Duynhouwer defies easy categorisation: filmmaker, screenwriter, chef, and — as Hugo Emmerzael discovers — someone who came to cinema through an appetite for living rather than an appetite for the canon. The conversation ranges from Spielberg to Kurosawa, from industry secrets to kitchen struggles, tracing how a genuinely prolific creative career is built not despite the obstacles but through them. An unusually frank conversation about what it actually takes to make it as a film professional in the Netherlands — and what it costs to stay honest with yourself when you do.
Davy Chou's Return to Seoul is one of the great films about identity: a story about adoption that refuses the comforting narrative we usually get, following a French-Korean woman who returns to her country of birth without any idea what she's looking for. Inspired by a close friend's experience, Chou speaks with Sophie about the challenge of writing a strong female Asian lead as a male director, about directing in a country and language that weren't his own, and about why the most important thing was to let the film be as strange and unresolved as the experience itself.
Stefanie Kolk came to filmmaking from biophysics — and that journey, as she describes it to Sophie, was not a detour but a preparation. Her films carry the precision of someone trained to observe, and the warmth of someone who discovered cinema through shared watching with her father. This Future Frames conversation explores how different entry points into the art form produce different ways of seeing — and why the filmmakers who arrive from elsewhere often notice what the insiders take for granted.
It started with Jurassic Park and a childhood obsession with Steven Spielberg that never quite left. Kim Kokosky Deforchaux — writer/director, Dutch Film Academy graduate, and Tom Ooms's good friend — has been building toward genre filmmaking with the conviction of someone who decided early what cinema was for. In this Future Frames conversation with Tom, Kim reflects on how an obsessive viewing life becomes a directorial sensibility, and what the gap is between studying screenwriting and actually making the film you want to make.
Elliot first encountered Ashley Rottjers's work at an IDFA Meets event — the short film Celestial Spaces: A Liberation on Meditation Practices — and was struck by its elegance and depth. This Future Frames conversation traces how a Rotterdam-based photographer became a filmmaker, and how a childhood encounter with Charlie's Angels became an unexpected permission slip to pick up the camera and claim her own gaze. Ashley's work is about the body, space, and what it means to be seen — and to decide who does the seeing.
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