Four voices. One shared obsession. Each week, the Celebrating Cinema team takes a film apart — not to explain it, but to find out what it’s made of, and what it makes of us.
Laura Gommans
Film Journalist
Laura writes about cinema with the precision of a critic and the curiosity of a cinephile who never stopped asking why. Her work spans reviews, interviews, and essays that treat film not as entertainment to be rated but as culture to be read. On Celebrating Cinema, she’s the one who finds the question no one else thought to ask — then refuses to let it go.
Hugo Emmerzael
Film Critic
Hugo brings a film critic’s rigour and a genuine love for cinema’s stranger corners. He’s as comfortable with Tarkovsky as with a late-night genre discovery, and his analyses have a way of making the familiar feel suddenly urgent. On Celebrating Cinema, he’s the one who’ll tell you what a film is really doing — even when it doesn’t know itself.
Kiriko Mechanicus
Filmmaker
Kiriko comes to the conversation from the other side of the screen. As a filmmaker, she talks about cinema the way a maker talks about craft — attentive to choices, alive to the gap between intention and effect. Her perspective cuts through theory to the practical, the physical, the felt. On Celebrating Cinema, she keeps the discussion honest about what it actually takes to make a film work.
Tom Ooms
Head of Cinema, LAB111
Tom programs cinema for a living, which means he’s spent years thinking about not just individual films but what films do to a room, to an audience, to a culture. As Head of Cinema at LAB111 — Amsterdam’s independent cinema — he shapes what the city watches. On Celebrating Cinema, he brings the programmer’s instinct: the sense of what a film is for, and who it’s for, and why that matters.