A pre-Christmas review roundup that lingers on three films deserving more attention than they've received. Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value — a quiet companion to The Worst Person in the World — is everything you'd want from a Trier winter film. Harris Dickerson's debut Urchin announces a new voice in British cinema. And Rose Byrne turns in one of the year's most undervalued performances in a film that, like the best gifts, arrives without adequate warning. Plus: the festive season, the cinema programme, and the argument about what to watch on Christmas Eve.
Sven Bresser's debut feature Rietland is the first Dutch film selected for Cannes in nearly thirty years — an eerie, unhurried drama about a reed cutter who discovers a murdered girl's body and finds the investigation turning inward. Speaking with Elliot, Bresser discusses what it means to make a first film that transforms landscape into moral witness, where the stillness of the Dutch countryside becomes the medium through which a question about violence is asked without being answered. A conversation about a new voice in Dutch cinema and what it takes to see clearly.
Sepideh Farsi's Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was made through a series of video calls with Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, conducted during Israel's assault on Gaza. The film is an act of witness as much as an act of cinema — a record of a life lived under conditions that most audiences will struggle to comprehend, made with the urgency of knowing the record might be all that remains. Speaking with Elliot, Farsi discusses why making this film was necessary and what it means to document survival in real time.
Legendary filmmaker Ernest Dickerson joins Elliot Bloom for a journey through one of the great careers in American cinema. From his early love of science fiction and a chance meeting with Spike Lee on his first day of film school, Dickerson reflects on the films that defined a generation: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Juice. With encyclopaedic knowledge and genuine passion, he traces the development of a visual language that captured Black American life with a specificity and urgency that mainstream Hollywood had never managed.
Raoul Peck — director of I Am Not Your Negro — has spent his career excavating the history that official archives prefer to leave buried. His documentary on Ernest Cole, South Africa's first apartheid-era photographer whose life ended in mysterious exile, is both intimate and structurally bold: a meditation on what images cost to make and what happens to the person who makes them. Speaking with Elliot, Peck draws connections between apartheid South Africa, contemporary systems of segregation, and the ongoing question of whether documentary cinema can do justice to lives lived under state violence.
No Other Land — made by two Palestinians and two Israeli filmmakers — is one of the most important documentaries of recent years: an account of the systematic destruction of the community of Masafer Yatta by Israeli settler violence, filmed over years of dispossession. Basel Adra, who grew up in Masafer Yatta and appears in the film, joins Yuval Abraham and Elliot for a conversation about what the camera can do when the story it is documenting refuses to stop. The film won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. This episode was made from the urgency of needing people to see it.
To mark the release of Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis — forty years in development, $140 million of the director's own money — the podcast turns to cinema's great ugly ducklings: the passion projects the industry dismissed and the culture eventually claimed. From Heaven's Gate to The Fall, from Apocalypse Now's production to every Jodorowsky project that never happened: an episode about what it means to risk everything for a vision — and whether the vision has to succeed for the risk to have been worth it.
When 26 royal treasures stolen from the Kingdom of Dahomey were finally returned from France, filmmaker Mati Diop was given rare access to document the moment. Dahomey does something more radical than chronicle a repatriation: it imagines the voices of the objects themselves, asking what it means for history to come home. The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin. Speaking with Elliot, Diop discusses what it meant to be entrusted with this story and why the ceremony of return raises as many questions as it settles.
Content note: this episode includes discussion of sexual violence. Shiori Ito's Black Box Diaries is one of the most courageous acts of filmmaking in recent memory: a first-person documentary about her own assault by media figure Noriyuki Yamaguchi, made in a culture where speaking publicly about sexual violence carries consequences most people would not accept. In conversation with Elliot, Ito reflects on her decision to film rather than simply testify, on what the camera allows you to say that words alone cannot.
In Kneecap, Rich Peppiatt delivers a raw and politically charged origin story about three Belfast outcasts who form the first Irish-speaking hip-hop group. The film is a powerful act of cultural resistance, celebrating the revitalisation of the Irish language through music. In conversation with Elliot, Peppiatt discusses the film's roots in Belfast, the specific challenge of making a political film that's also genuinely funny, and why the Irish language — long suppressed and slowly reclaimed — deserves its own cinema.
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