Essays on cinema.

In partnership with MUBI, Amalia Ulman — artist, internet pioneer, and now filmmaker — joins the podcast to discuss her debut El Planeta. Set in her childhood town of Gijon, the film is a dark comedy about economic precarity that refuses to sentimentalise the working-class experience. Shot in black and white, co-starring her own mother, El Planeta arrives from a practice of digital self-invention that predates the discourse around online identity by years — and translates that sensibility into cinema with disarming precision.

Gaspar Noe has spent twenty years being cinema's most polarising provocateur — and Vortex, his most restrained and devastating film, may be the one that converts the doubters. Speaking with Kiriko, Noe discusses how the film's radical split-screen structure emerged from the truth of dementia: two people living in the same space, in entirely separate realities. He reflects on collaborating with Italian giallo master Dario Argento, his enduring love for Tokyo, and what it means to make a film about dying that insists on looking directly at what everyone else looks away from.

Joined by the programmers of Imagine Film Festival, the largest celebration for fantastic film in the Netherlands, showcasing the best in fantasy, horror and science fiction. Lauren & Stan along with Tom & Hugo reminisce their first turn down spooky lane. Along this nostalgic path of agreeable scarring, they question what really is a horror in today’s film landscape.

Martijn de Jong's debut feature Narcosis — the Dutch Oscar entry — is a tender portrait of familial love and mourning: a diver who loses his colleague in an industrial accident, and the ripple of grief that follows. In conversation with Elliot, de Jong discusses his journey from commercial filmmaking to his first feature, the specific challenge of representing grief that is both ordinary and enormous, and what it means to make a film that wants to move its audience without manipulating them. An episode about Dutch cinema, craft, and the directorial instinct to connect.

Mia Hansen-Love's Un Beau Matin is her most autobiographical film — a portrait of a woman caring for her father as his mind dissolves, while also falling, somewhat involuntarily, into love. In conversation with Elliot, Hansen-Love discusses how cinema allows her to understand her own life's journey, why the autobiographical impulse in her work is not confession but investigation, and what it means to explore the most existential questions from the most intimate possible perspective. An episode about a filmmaker who has made a complete, deeply personal body of work entirely on her own terms.

Directors Sarah Blok and Lisa Konno bring a fashion-inflected documentary sensibility to the most underrepresented story in immigrant cinema: the father. Their short trilogy — timed to coincide with an exhibition at Dutch Design Week and the release of their accompanying book — strips away the expected immigrant narratives and offers something more tender and honest in its place. In conversation with Kiriko, they discuss why a hybrid form of documentary and fashion filmmaking can reveal more about a subject than a traditional talking-head approach.

Joined by the programmers of Imagine Film Festival, the largest celebration for fantastic film in the Netherlands, showcasing the best in fantasy, horror and science fiction. Lauren & Stan along with Tom & Hugo reminisce their first turn down spooky lane. Along this nostalgic path of agreeable scarring, they question what really is a horror in today’s film landscape.

What do you do when someone you love has decided they've had enough of living? Floor van der Meulen's debut feature Pink Moon asks this question without flinching — a fiction born from the reality of euthanasia laws, loneliness, and the gap between what we say we believe about a self-determined death and how we actually respond when it arrives. In conversation with Elliot, Floor reflects on her documentary background and what it teaches about the ethics of watching — and on why the most uncomfortable question her film raises is the one about ourselves, not her subject.

Are we witnessing the end of American mainstream cinema? Hugo Emmerzael invites filmmaker, critic, and video essay specialist Scout Tafoya to examine this question through a 10-part series about Ridley and Tony Scott as the architects of the American blockbuster — and the question of what happened to the filmmaking spirit they embodied when Hollywood became a franchise machine. What does the end of history mean for cinema? And if American mainstream film has stopped taking formal risks, where do the risks actually go?

Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil arrived as one of the most unsettling films of its year — a dark comedy about social compliance that starts with a holiday between a Dutch and a Danish family and ends somewhere much harder to recover from. Speaking with Elliot, Tafdrup describes the specific holiday experience that inspired the film, and his conviction that horror's greatest tool is not the monster but the social contract — the terrible things we accept to avoid being rude, and what that acceptance eventually reveals about who we really are.