Episodes

Part of Celebrating Cinema’s Future Frames series, spotlighting emerging filmmakers screening at LAB111’s Sunday Shorts programme. Rafik Opti is a filmmaker who finds their frame on the streets — drawn to the beauty of the unrehearsed, the accidental, the alive. In conversation with Kiriko, Opti traces an unlikely set of influences: Step Up, She’s the Man, Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation — popular forms that gave them permission to trust their own eye and trust their audience to feel what they feel. An episode about how cinema teaches cinema across the most unexpected distances.

Ira Sachs’s Passages is a film about desire consuming everything in its path — and Franz Rogowski’s performance at its centre is one of the great combustible acts of contemporary cinema. Speaking with Sophie, Sachs describes watching three films a day as a form of cinematic education, his debt to Yasujiro Ozu, and the specific challenge of writing a character who causes harm without ever losing the audience’s fascinated attention. A conversation about the ecstasy and risk in filmmaking — and why the best films make you feel both at once.

David Fincher refuses to be called an auteur, which is the most auteurist thing about him. His films are defined by obsessively controlled camera movement, a punishing number of takes, and a fixation on grey-green colour palettes that make even domestic spaces feel like crime scenes. From Se7en and Fight Club to Zodiac, The Social Network, and Mank — an episode about what it means to be a perfectionist director in an imperfect medium, and what Fincher’s characters reveal about the obsession that destroys people and makes great art simultaneously.

Martin Scorsese has been making films about obsession, faith, redemption, and the seduction of the American dream for fifty years — and what he actually thinks about any of it remains productively unresolved. Moving through his filmography from Mean Streets to Killers of the Flower Moon, the podcast examines the recurring figure of the man undone by his own desires, the Catholic guilt underlying even his most secular work, and why he remains cinema’s great chronicler of the gap between who we want to be and what we actually do.

A rare cultural moment in cinema: the release of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie had everyone talking. Sharing their experiences of watching the candy-coloured spectacle, the hosts question why Barbie was held to different standards compared to Nolan’s Oppenheimer — and ask where big studio cinema can go from here. An episode about expectation, cultural weight, and what it means when a mainstream film tries to say something genuinely feminist — and whether it actually succeeds.

Set against the rise of Russia’s authoritarian regime, filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s How to Save a Dead Friend is an homage to both a silenced generation and to her lover and best friend Kimi. A whirlwind of emotion capturing the specific intimacy of an anxious youth, a relationship tellingly universal that brings hope still in death. Speaking with Hugo, Marusya reveals the toils and costs of making this deeply personal film — and what the camera gave her that nothing else could.

With Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning in cinemas, the question is serious: is Tom Cruise singlehandedly keeping alive a form of visceral, physical, risk-it-all cinema that the rest of Hollywood has abandoned? This episode places Cruise in a lineage of genuine movie stars — from Buster Keaton’s physical bravado to the offscreen mythology that once made studios possible — and asks whether his commitment to the stunt, to the tangible, to the real, is an act of preservation or a beautiful last gesture before the format disappears entirely.

Timed to coincide with an Eye Filmmuseum retrospective and the return of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, Wrath of God to LAB111’s screens, this episode takes on one of cinema’s great obsessives. Werner Herzog’s concept of ecstatic truth — the idea that cinema’s job is not to document reality but to find the truth that lives beneath it — is the thread running through every rubber boat hauled over an Amazonian mountain, every conductor at the edge of collapse, every man who walked into a volcano. An episode about what it means to believe in cinema this completely.

Helena Castro, co-curator of the multidisciplinary film programme Witch Way Now at LAB111 and Paradiso, joins the podcast to trace the witch across a century of cinema — from Salem’s fires to The Witch, from Sleeping Beauty to Suspiria. Is the witch a feminist icon, or is that claim too convenient? How has her image evolved from monstrous threat to liberated archetype, and what does cinema reveal about representation when a figure this loaded changes hands across generations? An episode at the intersection of genre, politics, and the question of who gets to tell the story of the outcast.

The final episode in the Future Frames series brings two filmmakers into genuine conversation. Kiriko Mechanicus speaks with Razan Hassan — recent winner of Best Documentary at the Shortcutz Film Festival — about her teenage encounter with Bernardo Bertolucci, the depths of the Syrian new wave, and the relationship between pain and the urgent need to make something. Hassan’s upcoming film On the Edge of Life I Saw a Film is already drawing attention. A conversation about where the images come from when the world gives you every reason to look away.