Celebrating Cinema

Can you dismantle capitalism from inside Hollywood? For filmmaker, musician and outspoken communist Boots Riley, the contradictions of working within the very system he seeks to challenge have become central to his filmmaking, fuelling some of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive political satire.
From his breakthrough feature Sorry to Bother You to the surreal television series I’m a Virgo and his latest film I Love Boosters, Riley has developed a distinctly absurdist cinematic language that makes the mechanisms of capitalism impossible to ignore. In conversation with producer Elliot Bloom, he reflects on his journey from politically charged hip-hop group The Coup to filmmaking, the possibilities of communicating radical politics through popular entertainment, and why emotional storytelling can reach audiences in ways political theory alone cannot.
They also discuss the relationship between individual political awakening and collective action, the challenges of making anti-capitalist films within Hollywood, and cinema’s potential to help us imagine alternatives to the world we live in. After all, exposing what is wrong with the world is one thing. Imagining what comes next is another.

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Can cinema teach us how to protest?
In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, Elliot and Kiriko explore the possibilities and limitations of cinema as a tool for political resistance, and how imagining a different world might help us change the one we live in. Through two films that couldn't be more different, Boots Riley's I Love Boosters (2026), which turns the fight against capitalism into a candy-coloured, anarchic spectacle, and Felipe Bustos Sierra's documentary Everybody to Kenmure Street (2025), which revisits an extraordinary day in Glasgow when an entire neighbourhood mobilised to stop the deportation of two men.
What can Hollywood fantasy teach us about collective action, and what happens when resistance moves from the screen into the streets? From Riley's unapologetic communist politics and the contradictions of making revolutionary cinema within the Hollywood system to Third Cinema and the radical imagination of Sorry to Bother You, we consider how films can expand our political imagination, challenge established ideas about power and perhaps even inspire action beyond the cinema.
But there's a difference between imagining revolution and making it happen. What can cinema teach us about the realities of organising, resisting and building something different?

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Robert Pattinson went from playing the ultimate teen heartthrob in Twilight to taking on some of the strangest roles in contemporary cinema.
Host Laura Gommans is joined by producer Elliot Bloom to review Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, in which Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, the host of To Catch a Predator. From the bizarre world of sensationalist reality TV to Pattinson’s wonderfully weird career choices, we discuss how an actor who could have played romantic leads forever instead gravitated towards filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Claire Denis and the Safdie brothers.
Also in this episode, we share excerpts from Laura’s conversations with Clayface stars Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie, and director James Watkins, about the films that inspired them while making this new DC origin story.

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

Hollywood loves a remake. But why take a film that already works and make it all over again? Host Laura Gommans sits down with LAB111’s Head of Cinema, Tom Ooms, to dig into Hollywood’s habit of reworking films from around the world and what happens when it gets its hands on someone else’s story.
From Masayuki Suô’s Shall We Dance? and its Richard Gere-starring remake to Funny Games, The Vanishing and Force Majeure, they look at the changes that can turn a film into something completely different. There are American happy endings, cultural misunderstandings and the occasional remake that becomes a classic in its own right, as with Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, adapted from Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs.
With Odyssey Classics re-releasing the original Japanese Shall We Dance?, it’s a good moment to consider Hollywood’s never-ending impulse to remake the world in its own image.

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

What can cinema really fix? In The Beloved, Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen (The Beasts, Mother) explores the complicated relationship between a powerful film director and his estranged daughter, using the filmmaking process itself to examine questions of identity, domination and abandonment.
In conversation with film critic Hugo Emmerzael, Sorogoyen discusses turning the camera on cinema itself, experimenting with different visual languages, and creating a film within a film inspired by the work of Terrence Malick. He also reflects on his recurring interest in toxic masculinity, his collaboration with screenwriter Isabel Peña, and the personal experiences of fatherhood, loss and family history that shaped The Beloved.
Can art repair what life has broken? For Sorogoyen, cinema might not fix everything, but it can help us understand ourselves, and each other, a little better.

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