Celebrating Cinema

The death of French cinema icon Brigitte Bardot has reignited a familiar and uncomfortable question: can we separate art from the artist? Long celebrated as a screen legend, Bardot’s legacy is also inseparable from her openly expressed far-right views—forcing a renewed reckoning with how we engage with culturally significant work made by morally compromised figures.
In this episode of Celebrating Cinema, hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael reflect on their own responsibilities as viewers and critics. They discuss whether watching films by “bad people” can still offer insight into the art and the person behind it, and whether cinema can act as a space to confront difficult ideas rather than retreat from them.
If the work already exists, what does critical engagement look like—and do we watch films for their politics, their artistry, or something more complicated?
Get tickets to Le Mépris @ LAB111
Get tickets to Diaspora Diarires @ LAB111
Get tickets to Straight to Video: Brain Damage @ LAB111

Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael explore Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (yes, a movie about Shakespeare and his family), alongside a range of movies that are, in one way or another, really just adaptations of Shakespeare's plays.

Laura and Hugo also discuss Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a film that may have slipped under the radar this awards season, though Ethan Hawke’s magnetic performance is not to be missed, as well as the endearing documentary Tale of Sylian.

Get tickets to Hamnet @ LAB111
Get tickets to Diaspora Diarires @ LAB111
Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111

2000 Metres to Andriivka is an extraordinary and deeply immersive war documentary. The latest film from Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov gets hosts Kiriko and Hugo thinking about why we watch documentaries in the first place and what makes them so powerful right now.
They talk about how documentary cinema can respond to the urgency of the world around us, while also finding beauty in raw, unfiltered reality. As they unpack Chernov’s almost video game–like sense of movement and immersion, the conversation opens up into a bigger question: are documentaries showing us something that contemporary fiction films are struggling to capture?
Get tickets to 2000 Metres to Adrivka @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film & Food: Ramen Shop @ LAB111
Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111
Get tickets to It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley @ LAB111
Listen to Documentary Ethics w/ Miriam Guttman
Listen to The Estactic Truth: The Films of Werner Herzog

This week, Laura and Hugo dive into films chosen by you. Drawing from our LAB Suggestions programme, where audiences select their favourite films to be shown on the big screen in Amsterdam, they share their standout picks. From the chilling plausibility of Children of Men to a friendly (but pointed) debate over whether Christopher Nolan’s Inception owes more than a little to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.
Along the way, they share tidbits from conversations with Colin Farrell and Alfonso Cuarón, plus a voice note from one of our listeners whose pick, The NeverEnding Story, is heading to the big screen.
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Get tickets to Hamnet @ LAB111
Get tickets to The Actor’s Archive: Jane Fonda @ LAB111
Get tickets to Fight The Power: Goodbye Julia @ LAB111

As the year comes to a close, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom look back on the films that defined 2025. They revisit their standout favourites, unexpected discoveries, and the releases that missed the mark. They also explore why so many films from major directors felt surprisingly average this year and spotlight a handful of remarkable titles that never reached Dutch cinemas but deserve far more attention. Share your own favourite films of 2025 and join the conversation.