Episodes

One of LAB111’s resident filmmakers opened the Netherlands Film Festival with her debut feature — a film that began as documentary and became something harder to categorise. Witte Flits follows the real-life debate around euthanasia for unbearable psychological suffering, asking whether the theoretical right survives contact with reality. In conversation with Hugo, Laura Hermanides reflects on what it costs to change form midway through a project, and what it means to follow a story wherever it needs to go — even when the destination is harder than the journey.

Orson Welles stands as a visionary filmmaker, a notorious showman, and an enigmatic storyteller who blurred the lines between fact and fiction throughout his life. Tom Ooms and Elliot Bloom dive deep into the life and legend of one of America’s most celebrated yet elusive filmmakers. Timed to the re-releases of The Third Man and F for Fake at LAB111, an episode about a filmmaker who made ambiguity his method and audacity his only consistent rule — and what it cost him in Hollywood.

In the 1980s, director David Hinton made a documentary with Michael Powell that only told half the story. Now, with Powell gone and the full archive available, Hinton returns to complete the portrait of The Archers — the filmmaking partnership between Powell and Emeric Pressburger that produced The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter of Life and Death. In conversation with Elliot, Hinton explains why only Martin Scorsese could narrate this story, and what it means to finish a film that took forty years to be possible.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of Coraline, Laura Gommans speaks with director Henry Selick about his illustrious career and lifelong love for cinema. From childhood terrors at his aunt’s house to being transfixed by the cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Selick reveals the origins of his eerie yet tender storytelling style. A conversation about stop-motion animation as a form of commitment — the conviction required to build a world by hand, frame by frame — and why the films that frighten children are so often the ones they carry into adulthood.

From the screwball comedies of Hawks and Capra to the golden age of Nora Ephron, the romantic comedy has always revealed something essential about how a culture imagines love — and desire, and the acceptable limits of both. Entertainment journalist Laura Gommans joins to ask why, as our understanding of relationships has evolved, the genre that’s supposed to capture those feelings has stagnated. Are the cliches the point, or has the romcom lost the freedom to be genuinely funny about what people do to each other? An episode about genre, pleasure, and why we keep waiting for a great one.

Fucking Amal is not just a Swedish coming-of-age film — it’s one of the great documents of adolescent longing, and its evolution into a queer classic says something true about how cinema finds its audience across time. Director Lukas Moodysson joins Hugo to discuss what it meant to make a film this close to his own teenage experience, how its emotional directness has survived decades of cultural change, and why the themes at the core of his work — rebellion, loneliness, sincerity, humour — keep returning regardless of the form they arrive in.

The Netherlands consumes cinema from abroad with appetite but has historically been less good at celebrating its own. With the re-release of George Sluizer’s Spoorloos — one of the great Dutch films — the podcast asks why. Is it cultural insecurity, expressed through the dominance of vacation romcoms? Is it the absence of an infrastructure that would allow genuine auteur filmmaking to develop? And how is the next wave of Dutch filmmakers responding to the gap between Dutch cinema’s potential and its self-image?

Bill and Turner Ross make documentary cinema that feels like social experiment — giving their subjects freedom and following whatever truth that freedom produces. Gasoline Rainbow is their boldest test: five Gen-Z teenagers given a car and the American road, with no script and no destination. In conversation with Elliot, the Ross Brothers discuss what cinema can find when it stops controlling the outcome, why American documentary has become too cautious, and what happened when the teenagers decided to perform their most honest selves anyway.

What makes us fall for a film star? Actor Mike Gomez joins the podcast to examine the alchemy of screen performance — from Marlon Brando’s shadow over every method actor that followed to the question of whether today’s bankable names are influencers more than actors. The conversation circles cinema’s oldest seduction: the performer who makes you forget the camera is there, who makes you forget yourself entirely. An episode about what it actually means to act on screen — and why we keep believing in bodies we know are performing.

Sean Price Williams has been the cinematographer behind some of the most vital American indie films of the past decade. The Sweet East is his directorial debut — an exhilarating road trip across the fractured landscape of the American East Coast that functions as both genre film and cultural satire. In conversation with Sophie, Williams and star Talia Ryder discuss the film’s eclectic influences and what it feels like to make something genuinely strange in a landscape of controlled, predictable films. A conversation about the freedom that comes from having nothing to lose and a very specific vision.