At the Berlinale, Wim Wenders declared that cinema is not political. Elliot Bloom and Kiriko Mechanicus — both speaking from their own diasporic experiences — decided to test that claim. Moving through Persepolis, Incendies, Bend It Like Beckham, Girlhood, and Chantal Akerman's News from Home, they explore how diaspora cinema transforms the politics of borders and belonging into something deeply, unavoidably human. An episode about what it means to live between cultures — and why the cinema that insists it is not political is often the most political cinema of all.
Mstyslav Chernov's 2000 Metres to Andriivka is one of the most immersive war documentaries ever made — and its almost video-game-like quality prompts Kiriko Mechanicus and Hugo Emmerzael to ask fundamental questions about why we watch documentary films at all. What does the form offer that fiction cannot? What are the ethics of filming in the middle of active combat? And in an era when images of war circulate constantly through social media, what is the specific responsibility of the filmmaker who decides to compose rather than simply capture?
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Clueless — now back at LAB111 — Kiriko Mechanicus and Tom Ooms revisit the chick flick in all its fizzy, complicated, often underestimated glory. What is a chick flick, exactly? Who decides? And was the genre's disappearance a loss to cinema or a liberation from a label designed to diminish it? Moving through Clueless, Legally Blonde, and a range of cult favourites, they argue about what the genre was really doing when it was at its best — and why it refuses to stay gone.
Coinciding with the Viva Varda retrospective at LAB111, Elliot and Kiriko celebrate the life and cinema of Agnes Varda — the filmmaker who refused every category the industry tried to put her in, from the French New Wave to documentary cinema to video art. They discuss why Varda is Kiriko's ultimate cinematic hero, how her films mirror the warmth, curiosity, and humour of the woman herself, and why her approach to looking at the world — camera in hand, genuinely interested in whoever is in front of her — remains the most radical thing in cinema.
Dutch filmmaker Morgan Knibbe sits down with Kiriko to discuss The Garden of Earthly Delights — his debut fictional feature, a formally audacious and emotionally harrowing portrait of the post-colonial legacy in the Philippines. Through a fictional lens, Knibbe confronts the ongoing violence of Western capitalism and the devastating asymmetry between those who hold power and those who bear its consequences. An episode about what it means to make a film in a country that isn't yours, and why fiction can sometimes tell a truer story than documentary.
Akira Kurosawa is the director most likely to be cited as a direct influence by the directors everyone else is citing as influences. Elliot and Kiriko trace the specific quality of his filmmaking — the rain, the violence, the moral ambiguity that never resolves into certainty — through Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru, and High and Low. What does Kurosawa do with the question of truth that makes it feel different from any other filmmaker's answer? And what does it mean that his visual language has been absorbed so completely by world cinema that we sometimes forget where it came from?
Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour returns to cinemas — a quiet revolution in filmmaking that blends love, loss, and the long shadow of human destruction. Hosts Kiriko Mechanicus and Elliot Bloom unpack why this haunting classic still matters today. Why did Resnais turn to fiction after his devastating Holocaust documentary Night and Fog? And what does the film reveal about the limits of representation — what cinema can and cannot show of the catastrophic — that makes it as urgent now as it was in 1959?
Dutch Nazi propagandist Jan Teunissen was once one of the most powerful — and now largely forgotten — figures in Dutch cinema. In De Propagandist, director Luuk Bouwman unearths Teunissen's unsettling legacy: a filmmaker who aligned his artistic ambitions with the Nazi occupation. In conversation with Kiriko, Bouwman reflects on the ethics of examining a collaborator's work, and what Dutch cinema's suppressed history of wartime propaganda reveals about the relationship between art, power, and moral compromise.
Fresh from winning the Dutch Film Critics' Choice Award at the Netherlands Film Festival, LAB111 resident filmmaker Jeroen Houben joins Kiriko to discuss Torch Song — a film about an eccentric former pop singer who arrives in her estranged half-brother's life and proceeds to unravel it beautifully. Houben describes his desire to make a film that neither sentimentalises the struggling artist nor pathologises her, and his conviction that offbeat comedy can carry more emotional weight than drama that announces its intentions in advance.
Tarsem Singh calls The Fall his most expensive passion project — which, he notes, now has competition from Megalopolis. Nearly derailed by Harvey Weinstein, shot across 27 countries over seventeen years, The Fall is a film that shouldn't exist and does, sustained by a fanbase that championed it when the studios abandoned it. In conversation with Kiriko, Singh reflects on the film's restoration and rediscovery, what it cost to make, and why a film built from sheer aesthetic conviction eventually finds its audience regardless of what the industry decides.
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