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Artwork for Celebrating Cinema
TV & Film

Celebrating Cinema

LAB111

A podcast for the love of cinema.

Amsterdam's LAB111 film podcast on the cinema that matters — debates, rankings, and director deep dives, every Thursday. From cult classics to today's most-talked-about releases, Laura Gommans (film journalist), Hugo Emmerzael (film critic), Kiriko Mechanicus (filmmaker) and Tom Ooms (film programmer) take turns asking what films tell us about ourselves, our culture, and the times we live in.
Show notes and the CC newsletter at celebratingcinema.com.

You can get in touch at celebratingcinema@lab111.nl

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  • 24 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 42 min
  • English

Episodes 24

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  • April 23 · 35 min

    Truly Naked: Can a Film Be More Intimate Than Porn?

    Can a film be more intimate than pornography? Can a film be more intimate than pornography? In Truly Naked (2026), BAFTA-nominated writer-director Muriel D'Ansembourg tells the story of Alec — a teenager raised by two parents in the adult industry, who's seen everything about sex except real intimacy. A school project on porn addiction, and a feminist classmate, force him to confront how his generation actually encounters sex. Laura Gommans sits down with Muriel to ask what cinema still knows about intimacy that the erotic industry has given up on: close-ups, the gaze, the longing for touch. And whether a film that stages intimacy so precisely is any less manipulative than pornography. Follow LAB111 on Letterboxd Listen back to Where Has All The Sex In Cinema Gone.

  • April 16 · 49 min

    Musical Biopics: Can You Still Make a Good One? (Re-Release)

    A note from us: we spent the past two weeks going through your survey responses — thank you to everyone who filled it in. Winners will be contacted this week. We're working on what comes next, but we didn't want to leave you hanging. Last year it was A Complete Unknown, Better Man, Maria, this year it's now Michael Jackson. The musical biopic is back again, with all its cliches. We recorded this conversation when A Complete Unknown hit cinemas. Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael ask what it takes to make a great musical biopic — a genre too often content with greatest-hits storytelling: the origin-story childhood, the long climb, the fall, the redemption arc that arrives whether the life earned one or not. Cinema can do stranger, more honest things with a life. Why doesn't it? We revisit the films that actually break the formula, ask why audiences keep returning to the glossy reenactment, and consider what the genre would look like if it stopped playing it safe. With MJ arriving this month, it felt like the right moment to bring this one back.

  • April 2 · 37 min

    A-List Actors Gone Weird (Borgli's The Drama)

    What is the worst thing you've ever done? This week, hosts Laura Gommans and Elliot Bloom watched Kristoffer Borgli's The Drama — and neither of them could stop thinking about it. No spoilers, just their honest reaction to Zendaya and Robert Pattinson's wedding spiralling wonderfully out of control, and what it says about how quickly we judge other people's secrets while sitting on a few of our own. From there: why do the biggest stars on the planet — the ones who are Twilight, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games — keep choosing the strangest roles the moment nobody's watching? Robert Pattinson in sewers. Daniel Radcliffe with a gun for a hand. Kristen Stewart dismantling her own image frame by frame. Is it rebellion, artistic hunger, or is weird the only honest thing left after you've played a hero for a decade? And we're launching something new — Hot Takes, our listener segment where you get to say the thing nobody else will. This week: K-Pop deserves a place in the Criterion Collection. You might be surprised where we land. Get tickets to The Drama @ LAB111 Send your hot takes to celebratingcinema@lab111.nl Follow LAB111 on Letterboxd

  • March 31 · 31 min

    Mees Peijnenburg On A Family, Dutch Cinema, And The Emotional Architecture of Divorce

    Divorce is rarely one story. It's four, or five — each told from a different room in the same house. In his new film A Family, Mees Peijnenburg's puts the camera with the children, and what he finds there is something most films about broken homes don't often reach: not blame, not sides, but the bewildered love of people too young to know they're supposed to pick one. Producer Elliot Bloom sits down with Mees to talk about the film, Dutch cinema, and the emotional instinct at the heart of all his work — this search for the places where people feel safe, or desperately want to. We also get into his friendship with Lukas Dhont, director of Close, and why both filmmakers keep returning to young characters who are overwhelmed by life. A Family came from somewhere real for Mees, and yet it reaches beyond the personal — holding every perspective in a family coming apart, and asking what love looks like when the structure it lived inside is gone. Get tickets to A Family @ LAB111 Follow LAB111 on Letterboxd

Showing 21–24 of 24 episodes