Celebrating Cinema

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.

Steven Spielberg spent fifty years teaching us to look up. When the Pentagon released its real alien files, nobody blinked. His new film Disclosure Day marks the day the truth finally lands — this time his aliens look back at us, but the question is whether anyone still believes him.
Fresh from the Tuschinski premiere, Laura Gommans and producer Elliot Bloom get into late Spielberg — shortcuts, or message over quality — empathy as the ruling emotion of the universe, and whether cinema's great sentimentalist can still earn the tears. One of them cried twice. The other counted seventy FBI agents with no peripheral vision.
With a voice note from BBC film critic Ali Plumb on the night Spielberg crashed his pub quiz, and a listener's hot take on thirty wet years of Spielberg's cinematographer Janusz Kamiński.
Spoilers from 18:06 — come back when you've seen it.

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.

The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) was a small film about Los Angeles street racers, immigrant car culture, and a cop who didn't want to be one. Twenty-five years on it's a seven-billion-dollar franchise where cars get launched into space and "family" is a marketing strategy. From Echo Park to outer space — what does that arc tell us about Hollywood?
This is the first part of Cine of the Times, a new monthly Celebrating Cinema strand. Each month, critic Hugo Emmerzael (Filmkrant, Locarno) and media studies scholar Dan Hassler-Forest (Utrecht University) take one film from the century so far, ranging from arthouse to spectacular pulp. This month: the serialised blockbuster, the economics of the sequel, and how a street-racing B-movie became the template for the modern studio franchise.
Listen first. Then join us at LAB111 on Wednesday 17 June — curated clips, an extended introduction, and a post-screening discussion. Get your tickets here.
A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

Kane Parsons made the Backrooms on YouTube when he was only sixteen. Over 200 million views later, A24 has handed him his feature debut, making him the studio's youngest director ever at 20. But the yellow walls still don't end.
This week Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom go into the maze and come back with an answer that has very little to do with what's actually inside. The Backrooms, they argue, is about us, stuck in our own feedback loop, drifting through vacant spaces.
Online, half the internet thinks Kane Parsons couldn't have directed such a hit so young. Mark Duplass, who was on set the whole time, says they're wrong. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve carry the screen, with James Wan and Osgood Perkins producing. Laura and Elliot ask: what does it take to direct a feature like this at 20 with a crew this experienced? And has A24 found its next pipeline for talent — skipping film school for YouTube horror directors?

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A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw has been sending dispatches from Cannes since 1999. If you ask him what's changed in 27 years, he claims: nothing. He means it as a compliment.
Hugo Emmerzael sits down with the legendary film critic on the Croisette mapping out Peter's journey through film, from his first memory of cinema through the strange, accidental route into one of the most-read critic chairs in the English-speaking press. They get into why only Cannes, among the major film festivals, still places film criticism at the heart of it all.
Plus five films that caught Peter's attention this year: Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaur, Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland, Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Beloved, Marine Atlan's La Gradiva, and Clio Barnard's I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, and why we should value the politics inside the films rather than the statements and press conferences around them.
Get tickets to ⁠Cine of The Times: The Fast And The Furious⁠ @ LAB111
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Get tickets to ⁠Film Lecture: Everything Is Cinema - The Filmic Alchemy Of Jean-Luc Godard⁠ @ LAB111
A film podcast from LAB111 — Amsterdam's arthouse cinema for independent and cult films. Produced by Elliot Bloom.