Episodes

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.

To mark the 50th anniversary of The Holy Mountain — and the nationwide return of three Jodorowsky classics to Dutch cinemas — hosts Tom, Kiriko, and Hugo sit with the transgressive, spiritually overloaded cinema of one of the 20th century’s most unclassifiable filmmakers. What did the counter-culture actually want from cinema, and did Jodorowsky deliver it? What does it mean that this spirit — of film as initiatory experience — has largely disappeared from mainstream filmmaking? And is it gone, or simply waiting for the right moment to return?

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.

Timed to a live Celebrating Cinema event revisiting the film, director Catherine Hardwicke joins the podcast to discuss how she built a cultural phenomenon from a YA novel the industry didn’t quite know what to do with yet. Hardwicke talks about casting the film that launched Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, the specific challenges of directing as a woman in a studio system that had opinions about what a vampire romance should look like, and why she thinks the film still works — not despite its sincerity but because of it.

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.

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.