Celebrating Cinema

Some filmmakers don't just make great films, they change who cinema is for.
60 years ago, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (La Noire de...) announced a new cinematic voice to the world. Through the story of a young Senegalese woman working for a French family, Sembène exposed the brutal realities of colonialism while proving that African stories could—and should—be told on their own terms.
To mark the film's 60th anniversary, producer Elliot Bloom speaks with Alain Sembène, the filmmaker's son, about the remarkable life and philosophy behind one of cinema's true pioneers.
Together, they discuss why Sembène turned from literature to filmmaking, why he believed cinema could become "the people's night school," and how he dedicated his career to challenging audiences to question the systems that shape their lives.
Get tickets to Black Girl @ 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.

Why are journeys one of cinema's defining storytelling forms?
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey brings one of literature's greatest journeys to the screen. Laura Gommans and Tom Ooms discuss whether the film succeeds as an epic, why Nolan's obsession with IMAX shapes the experience as much as the storytelling, and whether a cast this famous ever lets the world of the film feel fully inhabited.
They also introduce LAB111's new season of quests, exiles and homecomings, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Beau Is Afraid to The Seventh Seal, asking what these films reveal about why cinema returns to stories of people searching for a place to belong.

Get tickets to The Odyssey @ LAB111
Get tickets to It's Not The Destination, It's The Journey @ 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.

Do ratings help us discover great films or have they quietly changed the way we watch?
Before you've even bought a ticket, you probably know the Letterboxd average, the IMDb score or the Rotten Tomatoes percentage. Somewhere between the opening scene and the closing credits, many of us are already deciding on a number of our own.
Laura Gommans is joined by producer Elliot Bloom to discuss what ratings have done to film culture. From an IMDb Top 250 that barely changes to Rotten Tomatoes' aggregate scores, they explore how audience opinion shapes everything from blockbuster filmmaking to the rise of safe, audience-tested stars, and why the best films rarely fit neatly into a number.

Get tickets to ⁠Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader⁠ @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Late⁠x @ LAB111

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

The Watermelon Woman (1996) was Cheryl Dunye's debut and the first American feature directed by a Black lesbian. A film that slips between video-store romance and a forged archive, asking who gets recorded by cinema and who gets written out of it. Thirty years on, it has been restored, added to the Criterion Collection, and, for the very first time, released in Dutch cinemas.
Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus is joined by Justine Knijn, distributor at Eye Filmmuseum and the person bringing the film to the Netherlands. They get into the film's faked documentary structure and its late reveal; the 1996 sex scene that drew conservative backlash over its tiny public budget; and the satire of academia.
A conversation about lesbian film history, restoration, and the long afterlife of films the industry tried to forget and a case for a mainstream gay summer.
Get tickets to ⁠⁠The Watermelon Woman @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠⁠Fight The Power: Palestine 36 @ LAB111
Get tickets to Girly Pop! But I'm A Cheerleader @ LAB111
Get tickets to Schmutz Cinema: Close-Up On Latex @ LAB111

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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.

Nobody has ever filmed a real alien, so why do they all look the same? The grey skin, the black almond eyes, sixty years running.
This week Laura Gommans is joined by historian Alexander Bartels, who curated LAB111's We Are Not Alone season, for a conversation about the gap between the aliens cinema gives us and the things people actually report seeing. On screen: greys, flying saucers, humanoid visitors. From the real records that Bartels studies: declassified military footage, radar data, government files from around the world there are mostly orbs and lights, unspectacular and almost impossible to film. So where did the grey come from? They follow the loop back to one telling case: The Bellero Shield, an episode of The Outer Limits that aired in February 1964, twelve days before Barney Hill, under hypnosis, drew the wrap-around-eyed alien that matched it almost exactly.
Screen and sighting have been copying each other ever since, right up to a 2024 Pentagon report that blames film and television for what people believe they've seen. Has cinema ever shown us something genuinely other, or only ever redrawn ourselves?

Get tickets to ⁠Disclosure Day⁠ @ LAB111
Get tickets to ⁠We Are Not Alone⁠ @ LAB111

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