INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE: Oscar Inside & Indie Cinema Discussions

Academy Award winner Juliette Binoche and newly nominated Gotham Award performer Tom Courtenay star in QUEEN AT SEA, a deeply moving and morally complex new film from writer-director Lance Hammer, returning to feature filmmaking 18 years after his acclaimed Sundance-winning debut, BALLAST. What happens when the person you've spent your life with begins to disappear right in front of you? And when...

John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito—and a New York that's disappearing before our eyes. In THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK, writer-director Noah Segan brings us a funny, suspenseful, and unexpectedly moving story about an aging thief whose particular skills—and the city he once knew—are becoming obsolete. In this conversation with INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE hosts Greg Laemmle and Raph...

What happens when a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy preparing for his bar mitzvah decides he might actually be Catholic? Actor Joshua Malina (The West Wing, Scandal) joins Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge to discuss ETHAN BLOOM, a warm, funny, and unexpectedly moving coming-of-age film about religion, grief, first love, and the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. Malina plays Gary, a wi...

What does it mean to spend your working life entering strangers’ homes, photographing their private spaces — and then moving on? Writer-director Paula González-Nasser joins Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge to discuss THE SCOUT, her acclaimed feature debut starring Mimi Davila as a New York location scout whose unusual job offers fleeting glimpses into the lives of strangers. Drawing from González-N...

THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2 | Amir Bar-Lev There are mountains people climb because they can. And then there is K2. The second-highest mountain on Earth, and one of its deadliest, had never been climbed in winter. For decades, mountaineers called it the last great first. In 2021, teams from around the world converged on its slopes to claim it. Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story, My Kid Could Paint That...

Sundance-winning director Josef Kubota Wladyka joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE to discuss HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY!, his joyous, deeply personal new film starring Oscar nominee Rinko Kikuchi. Kikuchi plays Haru, a woman whose life in Tokyo has revolved around ballroom dancing with her husband, Luis. When tragedy suddenly upends that world, Haru retreats from life — until family, friendship, desire and...

THE WEIGHT director Padraic McKinley joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE to discuss Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, and the making of his gripping Depression-era wilderness thriller. Set in Oregon in 1933, THE WEIGHT stars Hawke as Samuel Murphy, a father separated from his daughter and sentenced to a brutal work camp. When Warden Clancy, played by Crowe, offers him early release in exchange for transporting st...

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Orlando von Einsiedel joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE to discuss THE CYCLE OF LOVE, the extraordinary true story of PK Mahanandia and his nearly 6,000-mile bicycle journey from India to Sweden for love. In 1977, PK, a young street artist from Delhi born into a poor Dalit family, set out on a secondhand bicycle with a handful of paintbrushes and almost no money. His destin...

INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE celebrates two years of filmmaker conversations with Jim Jarmusch, Mark Cousins, Embeth Davidtz, Sara Khaki, Mohammadreza Eyni, and Alexandre O. Philippe. What began with the hope that someone might watch has grown into more than 100 episodes, nearly half a million subscribers, and over four million views. To mark our second anniversary, we’re returning to five of the conversat...

HOW TO DIVORCE DURING THE WAR director Andrius Blaževičius joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE to discuss Lithuania’s official Oscar submission and his Sundance-winning drama about marriage, Ukraine, propaganda and moral compromise. Marija tells her husband Vytas that she wants a divorce on February 23, 2022. The next morning, Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Blaževičius uses the fracture...

There is no straight line through the life of Franz Kafka. FRANZ director and three-time Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE for an extended conversation about Kafka and her bold, unconventional new film, a TIFF 2025 Official Selection. Rather than trying to solve the mystery of Kafka, Holland enters it—moving through dreams, letters, loves, fears and contradictions t...

Why would a woman pretend to be pregnant for nine months — and how do you tell her story without reducing her to either a victim or a villain? Two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Maite Alberdi joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE to discuss A CHILD OF MY OWN, her provocative new Netflix documentary about Alejandra, a woman whose desperate desire to become a mother leads her to construct an elaborate l...

What happens when recognition arrives decades after you’ve stopped waiting for it? Director Kent Jones joins INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE to discuss LATE FAME, starring Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, and Edmund Donovan. Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, a forgotten New York poet who abandoned his literary ambitions for a steady job at the post office. When an enthusiastic young admirer appears at his door, Ed is welcome...

Ten states, 10,825 miles, and 123 theaters. Director Rustin Thompson joins Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge to discuss THE LAST PICTURE SHOWS and the people keeping America’s small-town cinemas alive. Independent movie theaters, small-town cinemas, and the fight to preserve theatrical moviegoing are at the heart of THE LAST PICTURE SHOWS, a new documentary from filmmaker Rustin Thompson. Ten states...

Luis Valdez, LA BAMBA, ZOOT SUIT, Chicano cinema, and El Teatro Campesino take center stage in AMERICAN PACHUCO: THE LEGEND OF LUIS VALDEZ, director David Alvarado's documentary about a groundbreaking American artist. From performing on flatbed trucks for farmworkers with El Teatro Campesino to bringing ZOOT SUIT to Broadway and directing LA BAMBA, Luis Valdez transformed American theater and cine...

Celebrate Bastille Day with highlights from four filmmaker conversations featuring Rebecca Zlotowski, François Ozon, Louise Courvoisier, and Laura Piani—and the films A Private Life, The Stranger, Holy Cow, and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. To mark Bastille Day, we’re revisiting four conversations from the INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE archive—highlights from interviews with the filmmakers behind some of the...

David Wain joins us to talk about his new comedy, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass — a Sundance 2026 Official Selection starring Zoey Deutch, Jon Hamm, and John Slattery, from Sony Pictures Classics. The premise is deliberately, gloriously absurd: a Midwestern bride-to-be discovers her fiancé has used his "celebrity pass" to cheat — and sets off for Los Angeles to even the score with her o...

Documentary filmmaking, indie films, and arthouse movies take center stage in this special Fourth of July episode of Inside the Arthouse — a film podcast dedicated to independent film, indie cinema, and the voices that define American storytelling. While much of the industry turns to reboots, sequels, franchises, and superheroes, we're turning to a different kind of American story — films driven b...

Carla Simón’s new film ROMERÍA follows Marina, a young woman who travels to Galicia in search of the truth about the parents she never really knew. What begins as a practical errand becomes something harder to name — an excavation of memory, silence, and the stories families carry across generations. In this conversation, Simón reflects on the autobiographical roots of the film, the challenge of t...

From the directors of Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song comes a new portrait of a man who was somehow at the center of everything — and never quite in the frame. Peter Asher was one half of Peter & Gordon, swept into the British Invasion on songs written by Paul McCartney. He signed and produced James Taylor at Apple Records. He spent the next three decades guiding Linda Ronstadt, Carol...

Who was she? In this episode of Inside the Arthouse, we sit down with groundbreaking Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al Mansour for a conversation about UNIDENTIFIED, a gripping mystery thriller set in modern Saudi Arabia. The film follows Noelle Al Saffan, a recently divorced woman rebuilding her life through a clerical job at a police station. When the body of an unidentified teenage girl is discovered i...

INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE | THE CURRENTS — Director Milagros Mumenthaler What happens when a woman survives an inexplicable impulse — and tells no one? In this episode, Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge sit down with Argentinian-Swiss filmmaker Milagros Mumenthaler to discuss her haunting new psychological drama THE CURRENTS, distributed by Kino Lorber and an Official Selection of TIFF 2025. THE CURRENTS...

For our 100th episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, we return to the belief that started it all: movies matter most when they are shared. Over the course of 100 episodes, this show has become a gathering place for filmmakers, actors, programmers, distributors, theater owners, advocates, and film lovers who believe in the power of cinema on the big screen, in community, and in the places where stories st...

In Time and Water, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sara Dosa turns Iceland’s disappearing glaciers, a family’s archive, and one man’s fading memory into a cinematic letter to the future. Dosa, the director of Fire of Love, joins Inside the Arthouse to discuss her new documentary from National Geographic Documentary Films. The film follows Icelandic writer and poet Andri Snær Magnason as he gathers photo...

CAN ARTISTS AFFORD SILENCE? — BERNSTEIN'S WALL With Director Douglas Tirola In this episode of Inside the Arthouse, we explore Bernstein's Wall with director Douglas Tirola, the powerful documentary examining the life, legacy, and contradictions of Leonard Bernstein. Going beyond Bernstein's extraordinary musical career, the film reveals the personal and political tensions that shaped one of the m...