Celebrating Cinema

“My mother and cinema are my two teachers in life, each in their own peculiar ways.”
Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus and producer Elliot Bloom explore the parallels between these two teachers: the women who raise us, and the films that show us how to live, love and understand the world.
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary and re-release of Cría Cuervos, they look at a series of films from the 1970s — including Carrie, The Exorcist and Grey Gardens — in which the relationship between mothers and daughters becomes a way of thinking about changing ideas of womanhood, motherhood and what women are expected to be. At a time when those expectations were beginning to shift, these films capture some of the anxieties, desires and contradictions surrounding that change.
What do we inherit from our mothers? And what do we learn from cinema? Sometimes the two are not so different: both give us images of who we might become, what we might fear, and what we might choose to do differently.

Get tickets to Cría Cuervos @ LAB111
Get tickets to Mothers & Daughters @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

In 2007, the Coen Brothers made a thriller set in 1980 that somehow captured an American dread that hadn't fully arrived yet. Critic Hugo Emmerzael and academic Dan Hassler-Forest return to No Country for Old Men — the coin toss, the deaths that happen offscreen, the sheriff who solves nothing — to ask how a film everybody already loves quietly called the next twenty years.
Hugo and Dan get into the film's nihilism, its collapse of the Western hero and detective who restores order, and the strange afterlife of Javier Bardem's iconic Anton Chigurh: from Oscar winner to right-wing meme. JD Vance has even used Chigurh's monologue in a political speech, while Pete Hegseth apparently mistook Pulp Fiction for the Bible.
And what does No Country for Old Men have in common with Euphoria? What felt like a disturbing vision of a society emptied of values in 2007 can now feel less like a warning than a description of everyday life.

Get tickets to ⁠⁠Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠⁠ @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

We’re constantly told to slow down and be present, but what does it actually mean to pay attention when so much of modern life is designed to scatter it?
This summer, French auteur Jacques Tati returns to LAB111 in six newly restored 4K classics, including his magnum opus PlayTime. Few filmmakers have looked at modern life with Tati’s comic precision: traffic becomes choreography, bureaucracy becomes absurd theatre and the city itself becomes a machine for distraction.
Producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus explore attention, bureaucracy and urban life through Tati’s PlayTime, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Scorsese’s After Hours, looking at what happens when the structures of modern life become so consuming that we stop noticing the lives we’re actually living.
But if paying attention has become something we increasingly struggle to do, what should we make of films that turn it into a virtue? In Perfect Days, is noticing the world a genuine alternative to modern life — or are we fetishising attention itself?
Get tickets to It's Cinema! The Films of Jacques Tati @ LAB111
Get tickets to After Hours @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠ @ LAB111

A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.

What makes a film camp? Is it something filmmakers create, or something audiences discover?
To celebrate Pride Month and LAB111's Camp, Cult & Queer programme, filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by film programmer Alicia Bergamelli to unpack one of cinema's most elusive ideas. Drawing on Susan Sontag's famous essay Notes on "Camp", they explore where camp came from, why it has become inseparable from queer culture, and how audiences can completely reshape a film's meaning over time.
Through films including Bound, Cruising, Pink Flamingos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, they discuss the difference between intentional and accidental camp, why works once dismissed or condemned can become beloved classics, and what these changing reputations reveal about cinema, identity and the communities that keep films alive.
Get tickets to Camp Cult & Queer @ LAB111
Get tickets to Y Tu Mama Tambien @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111
Get tickets to The Departed @ LAB111

Who gets to tell a story? And who gets to see themselves reflected on screen?
Sixty years after its release, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (La Noire de..., 1966) remains one of the defining works of African cinema. Restored in 4K and re-released by Odyssey Classics for its anniversary, Sembène's groundbreaking debut follows Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who travels to France believing she's beginning a new life, only to find herself trapped within the lingering structures of colonial power.
Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by filmmaker and archivist Djeneba Saccoh to discuss why Black Girl still feels so vital today. Together they unpack the quiet resistance woven through the film—from Diouana's inner monologue to the carved mask that passes between worlds.
From there, Kiriko and Djeneba trace the film's influence through Mati Diop's Dahomey to Souleymane Cissé's Den Muso, exploring how filmmakers across generations have continued to grapple with questions of representation, power and who gets to tell their own story.
New to Ousmane Sembène? We recommend listening to our companion interview with his son, Alain Sembène, in which producer Elliot Bloom explores the life, philosophy and legacy of the filmmaker often described as the father of African cinema.
Get tickets to Black Girl @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men⁠ @ LAB111