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.
Join Elliot Bloom and Tom Ooms on a cinematic road trip through the films of Wim Wenders — timed to LAB111's Drifters and Dreamers retrospective and the stunning 4K restoration of Paris, Texas. From Wings of Desire to Perfect Days, the episode explores the recurring themes of transience, memory, and the search for belonging that define Wenders's work. An episode about a filmmaker who has spent fifty years asking what it means to be at home in the world — and why cinema is the only form spacious enough to hold the question.
Following a packed-out CC Film Club screening of Knight of Cups, Hugo Emmerzael chats with Tom van der Linden — creator of the acclaimed YouTube channel Like Stories of Old, which combines media analysis with personal reflection in video essays viewed by millions. Together they explore this often-overlooked Terrence Malick film: its dreamlike structure, its relationship to loss and desire, and what it means to make a film that refuses to explain itself. An episode about how to watch a Malick film, and why some films require you to surrender your critical defences before they open.
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.
Kevin Boitelle made his feature debut on a shoestring, and the result is one of the sharpest comedies about the Dutch film industry in years. Trip-Tych is simultaneously a film about making films and a meditation on what the creative process costs — personally, financially, and aesthetically. In conversation with Kiriko, Boitelle returns to his earliest film obsessions and the collaborations with friends that taught him what cinema should feel like: joyful, collective, and free. An episode about how to make something from nothing — and why the joy in that process is itself worth preserving.
To coincide with the Girls of Plenty programme at LAB111 and the release of film journalist Basje Boer's essay collection Liggend Naakt, the podcast examines cinema's female archetypes — the bold ladies, the enigmatic witches, the figures whose exaggerated femininity has been both a constraint and, in the hands of the right filmmaker, a form of power. An episode that takes pleasure seriously: asking what it means to love a stereotype, to be moved by a cliche, and what cinema has actually been doing with female characters when it thought it was just being entertaining.
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