Celebrating Cinema

For this Nederlands Film Festival special, Kiriko Mechanicus meets two rising Dutch filmmakers who use cinema to get closer to people and histories — and to find out what lies beyond what they already know.
Amanda van Hesteren's Dagen met Blue is built around the trust between filmmaker and subject. Kiriko chats to Amanda about her fascination with people in all their colours, how she creates the space for Blue to open up, and what she can learn about someone by spending enough time with them to look beyond the version of themselves they show the world.
In Bagasi – wat we meedragen, Emma Lesuis investigates her family's colonial history in Suriname. By combining documentary and theatre, Emma finds a way into a history that runs through both the colonised and the coloniser in her own family and, in the process, comes to see that history differently.
Sometimes, you have to make the film to understand what you're actually looking at.

Watch Dagen Met Blue @ NFF
Watch Bagasi on NPO

How did 9/11 change Hollywood and when does entertainment become propaganda?
Marking 25 years since 9/11 and coinciding with LAB111’s Manufacturing Consent programme, Elliot Bloom and film critic Hugo Emmerzael trace cinema’s long relationship with propaganda and political power. From revolutionary montage and The Battle of Algiers to Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty and Iron Man, they look at how wars are sold, enemies invented and ideology turned into entertainment.
At the centre of the conversation is the profound shift in American cinema after 9/11, when the War on Terror became embedded in Hollywood storytelling and spectacle. Elliot and Hugo unpack why propaganda rarely announces itself as propaganda, and how the films we watch can shape whose stories we believe, whose violence we accept and who gets cast as the enemy.
Get tickets to Manufacturing Consent @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film Lecture: Cinematic Ghosts of 9/11 @ LAB111
Get tickets to Akira @ LAB111
Get tickets to Film & Food series @ LAB111

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

Thirty-five years after Terminator 2: Judgment Day, cinema is still imagining the end of the world through killer machines, nuclear war, viruses and alien invasions. But did one of the greatest blockbusters ever made teach us to imagine the apocalypse all wrong?
With Terminator 2 returning to our screens in 4K, producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus ask why cinema is so obsessed with watching the world end and why Hollywood tends to make collapse so spectacular. Through Children of Men, Idiocracy and Brazil, they look beyond the big cinematic apocalypse to the dystopias where life simply carries on.
From our need to give the things we fear a human face to our strange enjoyment of watching everything fall apart, the conversation explores what these imagined futures reveal about the world we already live in. And whether dystopian cinema, rather than simply indulging our worst fears, might give us a way of imagining something different.
Get tickets to Terminator 2: Judgement Day @ LAB111
Get tickets to Akira @ LAB111
Get tickets to The Big Lebowski @ LAB111

“My mother and cinema are my two teachers in life, each in their own peculiar ways.”
Filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus and producer Elliot Bloom explore the parallels between these two teachers: the women who raise us, and the films that show us how to live, love and understand the world.
Coinciding with the 50th anniversary and re-release of Cría Cuervos, they look at a series of films from the 1970s — including Carrie, The Exorcist and Grey Gardens — in which the relationship between mothers and daughters becomes a way of thinking about changing ideas of womanhood, motherhood and what women are expected to be. At a time when those expectations were beginning to shift, these films capture some of the anxieties, desires and contradictions surrounding that change.
What do we inherit from our mothers? And what do we learn from cinema? Sometimes the two are not so different: both give us images of who we might become, what we might fear, and what we might choose to do differently.

Get tickets to Cría Cuervos @ LAB111
Get tickets to Mothers & Daughters @ LAB111

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

In 2007, the Coen Brothers made a thriller set in 1980 that somehow captured an American dread that hadn't fully arrived yet. Critic Hugo Emmerzael and academic Dan Hassler-Forest return to No Country for Old Men — the coin toss, the deaths that happen offscreen, the sheriff who solves nothing — to ask how a film everybody already loves quietly called the next twenty years.
Hugo and Dan get into the film's nihilism, its collapse of the Western hero and detective who restores order, and the strange afterlife of Javier Bardem's iconic Anton Chigurh: from Oscar winner to right-wing meme. JD Vance has even used Chigurh's monologue in a political speech, while Pete Hegseth apparently mistook Pulp Fiction for the Bible.
And what does No Country for Old Men have in common with Euphoria? What felt like a disturbing vision of a society emptied of values in 2007 can now feel less like a warning than a description of everyday life.

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.