The Klassiki Podcast

Here at Klassiki, we’re very excited about our forthcoming season of screenings inspired by the pioneering science fiction of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. After Utopia: the Strugatsky Brothers on Film is presented in partnership with Pushkin House and will be bringing four film adaptations of the Brothers’ works to London screens between 6-13 November.

The Strugatskys dominated Soviet sci-fi with their philosophical, subversive, and hugely popular stories, which have long proven compelling to filmmakers. And no director did more with their work than the great Aleksei German in his posthumous, mud-soaked masterpiece Hard to Be a God. This week, Sam speaks with film scholar Muireann Maguire, Professor in Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter, about the Strugatsky’ philosophical parables, German’s unique approach to cinema, and how the two collided onscreen.

After Utopia: the Strugatsky Brothers on Film runs from 6-13 November at the ICA, the Garden Cinema, and Pushkin House, featuring screenings of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse, Grigori Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, and Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God.

Watch three more Aleksei German titles on Klassiki here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal and hailing the Halloween season with an essay on the things that went bump in the night in Soviet cinema. The USSR wasn’t renowned for its horror, but in films like the cult classic Viy, directors were occasionally able to create gruesome and thrilling spectacles. The inspiration for many of these films was the writing of Nikolai Gogol, which drew on the folklore of his native Ukraine to imagine a world populated by malignant spirits. Gogol has cast a long shadow over cinema beyond his influence on horror, providing a version of Ukrainian national history and culture that influenced some of the nation’s most important filmmakers.

Read the original piece here. Our Halloween offering for subscribers this year is Kazakh Scary Tales, a folk horror anthology film from maverick director Adilkhan Yerzhanov, which is available on the site from this Thursday 29 October.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

On Klassiki, we’re currently celebrating the work of the great Hungarian director István Szabó with restorations of two of his new wave classics, Father and The Concert. To go a little deeper on Szabó’s fascinating filmography, which stretches over six decades and has garnered awards from Cannes to the Oscars, this week Sam catches up with our friend Carmen Gray, a critic and programmer specialising in the cinema of eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

Sam and Carmen explore Szabó’s lifelong project – chronicling the tragic twentieth-century history of Hungary and its Central European neighbours – with reference to his celebrated trilogy of historical dramas, Mephisto (1981), Colonel Redl (1985), and Hanussen (1988). They discuss their theatricality, deconstruction of identity and sexuality, and how they reflect Szabó’s own life experiences.

Watch restorations of István Szabó’s sixties classics Father and The Concert on Klassiki now.

You can also read our companion piece on his career over on the Journal and check out our pod episode on his 1980 melodrama Confidence with critic Alisa Goruleva here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Estonian director Leida Laius was an unsung pioneer. Working from the sixties until the fall of communism, her films are striking for their empathetic exploration of the lives of women, from motherhood and marriage to sexuality. While she’s heralded in her homeland, like many female directors, her international reputation hasn’t kept pace with her talents – although there are welcome signs that this is changing, with a slew of new restorations and repertory screenings in recent years.

One such retrospective took place at the Spectacle Theater in New York earlier this year, programmed by critic and curator Kat Docalovich. This week, Sam is joined by Kat and Baltic cinema expert Josh Polanski to discuss the life and times of Leida Laius.

You can watch restorations of Laius’s final two films, Smile at Last and A Stolen Meeting, on Klassiki now, and read more about her work over on our Journal.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Welcome listeners old and new to season eight of the Klassiki Podcast. We’ve got ten more episodes coming up for you to take us up to the festive season, with returning guests and new voices, covering the great and the good of Eastern European film. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

Sergei Loznitsa remains one of the biggest draws in Eastern European cinema today. The Ukrainian filmmaker moves freely between fiction and both observational and archival documentaries in his efforts to excavate the dark depths of Russian and Soviet history. His latest feature, Imperium, premiered at Venice earlier this year and is now coming to the UK this month as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It’s perhaps Loznitsa’s most ambitious archival documentary yet. Using a treasure trove of newly uncovered footage captured in the early seventies by visiting Italian filmmakers, Loznitsa constructs a vast and partisan panorama of life under communist rule, from the Baltic Sea to the Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan. Ahead of its London bow, host Sam Goff spoke with the director about taking the pluge with this material, the history of Soviet documentary, and the enduring power of national cultures.

The 70th BFI London Film Festival is taking place from 7-18 October. Find out more and stay tuned to the Klassiki Podcast and Journal for more coverage. You can get tickets for the screening of Imperium on Tuesday 13 October here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

That’s a wrap on season seven of the podcast. As always, thank you for listening along. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss us when we return for season eight in the autumn. And please, leave us a five-star rating and share the show far and wide so we can continue to grow. Thank you.

The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival has just come to a close. Every year, this resort town on the shores of Lake Maggiore hosts to one of the world’s most rewarding festivals, balancing arthouse favourites with a ready supply of lesser-known talent. Friend of the show Sona Karapoghosyan – critic and programmer for Armenia’s Golden Apricot Film Festival – has been back in Locarno this year, serving as a member of the FIPRESCI Jury for the international competition. Sam caught up with her before the award winners were announced to chat about some East European and Caucasian titles from the programme – including what turned out to be the top prize winner, with the Golden Leopard going to Romanian stalwart Florin Șerban’s You Don’t Belong Here. Also up for discussion are I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, Isabelle Stever’s transgender romance from wartime Ukraine, and Demons, Natalka Vorozhbyt’s darkly supernatural Russia-Ukraine allegory.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

The forest is one of the prevailing symbols of Russia and its former imperial holdings: from the Baltic to the taiga to the Pacific. But how has the forest informed Russia’s sense of itself and its place in the world? This is the question at the heart of Sophie Pinkham’s new book, The Oak and The Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires: a cultural and environmental history about the role of the forest in making and resisting the Russian and Soviet states, stretching from the Bronze Age to the war on Ukraine.

This week, Sam invites Sophie onto the pod to discuss the forest on film. How have filmmakers related to the Russian forest and what do their films tell us about Russian and Soviet colonialism and environmentalism? Sam and Sophie explore all this, as well as pagans, geologists, and partisans, with reference to cinematic classics including Andrei Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, and Larisa Shepitko.

Make sure to check out Sophie Pinkham’s book The Oak and The Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Among his many achievements, the Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins is perhaps best known for his sprawling documentaries charting the history of cinema: The Story of Film: An Odyssey, originally released in 2011, and Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, from 2019. Now, Mark is back with a third entry in this pantheon: The Story of Documentary Film. Like its predecessors, it's an epic undertaking, with 16 hour-long chapters running from the 19th century to the present day and ranging all across the globe, examining the political, social, and aesthetic factors that have shaped documentary, with examples ranging from the canonical to the deliciously obscure.

This week, host Sam Goff sits down with Mark for a fittingly wide-ranging conversation about how he approaches these long-form odysseys, his personal experiences in Eastern Europe, from visiting Moscow during perestroika to watching films in bomb shelters in Sarajevo, and some of his favourite filmmakers from the region.

Explore Klassiki’s collection of documentary titles here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Long time listeners of the show will be familiar with the film historian Ian Christie, who’s joined us to discuss topics ranging from Aleksandr Sokurov to Powell and Pressburger, the Soviet avant-garde to The Saragossa Manuscript. His new book, The Most Important Art: Exploring the Hidden Histories of Russian and Soviet Cinema, collects writings and interviews from decades of pioneering work on subjects ranging from the silent era to contemporary figures like Andrei Zvyagintsev.

Ian spent the final years of the Soviet era travelling back and forth to the USSR, witnessing the social and cultural revolution that was unfolding and befriending many of the leading figures in the film industry. This week, host Sam Goff invites Ian back on the pod to reflect on those experiences and to share his memories of encounters with artists like Andrei Tarkovsky, Kira Muratova, Elem Klimov, and many more.

The Most Important Art: Exploring the Hidden Histories of Russian and Soviet Cinema is on sale now from Sticking Place Books.

Klassiki subscribers can explore a special watchlist featuring many of the films that Ian discusses on this episode here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Renowned in his native Georgia as one of the nation’s greatest filmmakers, Otar Iosseliani spent the majority of his career in his adoptive home of France after emigrating in the early eighties. The news that Cinema Guild will be releasing a slate of restorations has occasioned an extensive retrospective in New York, where audiences can acquaint themselves with the director’s bustling long takes, mordant satire, and anarchic sympathy for the drunks, losers, and misfits of both Soviet communism and western capitalism. Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life opens this week at Asia Society before heading over to Metrograph, and we’re delighted to say that Klassiki will be co-presenting the programme at both venues.

This week, host Sam Goff speaks with Edo Choi, Film Programmer at Metrogaph, and Inney Prakash, Curator of Film at Asia Society, about the retrospective and Iosseliani’s unique cinematic sensibility, which bears comparison with directors from Jacques Tati to Jean-Luc Godard, and even the Safdie Brothers.

Fables of Modern Life kicks off at Asia Society on 24 and 25 July, then continues at Metrograph from the 8 to the 23 August.

Klassiki subscribers can watch a double bill of Iosseliani titles on the site from this Thursday 23: his debut feature Falling Leaves, and the French farce Farewell, Home Sweet Home.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

We have a bonus episode for you this week. Host Sam is in Yerevan, Armenia, attending the Golden Apricot International Film Festival – always a highlight of the year for us here at Klassiki. The festival is renowned for its championing of films from the Caucasus and Near East, and for its engagement with the Armenian diaspora.

Sam took the opportunity to sit down with Savina Petkova and Flavia Dima –two of our favourite critics (and Klassiki Podcast alumni) – to discuss some of the films they’ve caught so far, including Marlene Edoyan’s A Fire There, Comes Chahbazian’s Here, Elsewhere, and Inna Sahakyan’s Outliving Shakespeare, as well as Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cannes-approved Fatherland, starring Sandra Hüller.

You can read a selection of reviews from Golden Apricot’s Critics’ Campus here. We’ll be publishing more from Yerevan on the Journal over the next few days, so keep your eyes peeled.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for an essay on the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu. The most elusive of the founding fathers of the Romanian New Wave, Porumboiu’s postmodern comedies play on questions of language and identity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his crime dramas, Police Adjective and The Whistlers, where genre thrills undergo playful revisions to the point of absurdity. As Porumboiu completes work on his first feature in seven years, there’s never been a better time to take a closer look at his deceptively playful films.

Read the original piece here and watch Porumboiu’s gangster film The Whistlers on Klassiki for the next month, until 13 August only.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

We’re a few weeks into season seven, so it’s about time to open up the Kino Club, our watch-along exploration of the Klassiki catalogue. For this edition, I spoke with one of our favourite critics, Botagoz Koilybayeva, who’s written for the Klassiki Journal among many other outlets. As always, we asked Botagoz to pick a film from our library that she hadn't seen before, watch it, then jump on a call to discuss. Her pick was Tough Kids, the 1983 social drama about teen delinquency and redemption by the sorely underrated Soviet director Dinara Asanova.

Botagoz and host Sam Goff get into Asanova’s tragically short career and her controversial working methods, as well as the social and emotional undercurrents of her filmography.

Watch along with us on Klassiki now! And make sure to check out Botagoz’s writing on Ali Khamraev and the politics of contemporary Kazakh film.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Russian documentary has been in the limelight following the Oscar win for Mr Nobody Against Putin earlier this year. The film consists of footage covertly shot by videographer Pasha Talankin inside the school where he worked, capturing how the militarisation of the modern Russian state makes itself felt in the classroom. Mr Nobody raises important questions about the ethical and logistical challenges of non-fiction filmmaking in wartime Russia – but its profile risks overshadowing a rich documentary tradition.

In their new edited volume The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism, scholars Masha Shpolberg (Bard College) and Anastasia Kostina (Columbia) argue that in the face of growing repression, the 21st century has actually seen a boom in Russian non-fiction cinema: from new film schools and festivals to formal experimentation and theoretical debates, inspired by a desire for objectivity in the face of media manipulation from an increasingly coercive regime. This week, host Sam Goff welcomes Masha and Anastasia onto the pod to discuss the history and the role of documentary film in Putin’s Russia.

Check out Masha’s and Anastasia’s book here.

Explore our collection of contemporary Russian documentaries here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Last week saw the 124th anniversary of Boris Barnet, one of the most influential filmmakers of the Soviet Union. In Europe, Barnet’s lyrical and humanistic cinema has long been canonised – but in the English-speaking world, he was until recently a more acquired taste. That’s changed in recent years: there have been major retrospectives in Chicago and New York, and our friends at Outskirts Magazine (which is named after one of Barnet’s most beloved pictures) published a fantastic dossier on his work in their first issue.

To understand this shift, this week host Sam Goff speaks with Boris Nelepo, who listeners might remember from our episode last year on Marlen Khutsiev. Boris is a programmer and critic from Moscow now based in Lisbon, where he is Co-Head of programming at the DocLisboa International Film Festival. Sam and Boris take on the long, difficult sweep of Barnet’s career, which stretched from silent comedies to wartime thrillers and sixties road movies, touching on the utopian spirit of his films and the loneliness that contributed to his tragic early death from suicide in 1965.

Watch Boris Barnet’s films Girl with a Hatbox and Outskirts on Klassiki now.

Read Boris Nelepo’s writing on Barnet here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Welcome back to season seven of the Klassiki Podcast! We’ve got ten more episodes coming up for you on the past and present of eastern European film, including some reporting from the summer festival circuit and a very exciting screening series coming up for our American friends. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss an episode.

One of the highlights of last month’s Cannes festival was the long-awaited return of German filmmaker Valeska Grisebach, who took home the Jury Prize for The Dreamed Adventure, which arrives nine years after her previous feature Western. The Dreamed Adventure sees the director return to Bulgaria, Grisebach crafting a brilliant subversion of her genre influences with the story of Veska, a female archaeologist who gets tangled in the criminal underworld of her small border town.

Host Sam Goff sits down with Valeska Grisebach to discuss her attachment to Bulgaria, her understanding of gender and genre, and the incredible real life stories that informed her unique take on the gangster film.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

We’ve reached the end of season six. Thank you to all our subscribers and listeners old and new. We’ll be back in the summer – but in the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and please leave us a review and a five-star rating. Thank you!

For this final episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for an essay on one of the masterpieces of Polish cinema: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s monumental Dekalog. Ten hour-long films inspired by the Ten Commandments, all set in the same Warsaw tower block complex, this intimate epic of everyday life arrived at the end of the communist era and asked penetrating questions about the spiritual and material direction of Polish society as transformation loomed.

Read the original piece here and watch Kieślowski’s Dekalog spin-off feature A Short Film about Love on Klassiki now.

Find out more about Poland in the eighties with our companion piece and explore Kieślowski’s career here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

This week, cinema audiences in London are getting the rare chance to see a selection of films by the great Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian as part of the Open City Documentary Festival. Pelechian’s work, described by Serge Daney as “a missing link in the true history of the cinema”, cuts across documentary, fiction, and essay film, exploring national and natural history, socialist labour, biblical symbolism, and technological progress and catastrophe.

The Pelechian programme at Open City has been put together by an old friend of Klassiki: Sona Karapoghosyan, a program curator at Yerevan’s Golden Apricot Film Festival. So this week, host Sam Goff asked Sona to join him in introducing the poetic world of Pelechian’s films.

Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian, screens over two consecutive nights this week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London: Tuesday 14th and Wednesday 15th. Find all the information you need, book tickets, and read an essay by Sona here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

It’s been a while since we opened up the Kino Club, our watch-along exploration of Klassiki’s ever-expanding catalogue. We’re putting that right this week with a brand new guest: critic, programmer, and teacher Savina Petkova. As always, we asked Savina to pick a film from our library that she hadn't seen before, watch it, then jump on a call to discuss. Her pick was Getting to Know the Big Wide World, the 1978 construction site romance by the inimitable Kira Muratova.

Savina and host Sam Goff find plenty to admire in Muratova’s unique approach to love triangles, cinematic mirrors, and the beauty of the building site.

Watch along with us on Klassiki now! Subscribers can also check out Muratova’s early films Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell on the site. You can find more from Savina here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.

Last week we launched the latest edition of Klassiki Picks, our series of watchlists curated by our friends in the world of cinema and eastern Europe. In this hot seat this time around is British filmmaker Peter Strickland, director of The Duke of Burgundy, Berberian Sound Studio, and In Fabric, among other weird and wonderful titles. Peter has a special link to the world of Eastern European film: after a number of years living in Slovakia and Hungary, he burst onto the international stage in 2009 with his feature debut Katalin Varga, shot in Transylvania on a tiny, self-financed budget.

Peter has curated a selection of five titles for Klassiki that reflect his personal and professional history in the region. He sits down with host Sam Goff to talk about his time living and working in Slovakia and Hungary, and his picks, which include Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the children’s animations of Czech trailblazer Hermína Týrlová, Péter Gothár’s cult Hungarian satire The Outpost, and two Slovak films that explore the place of the church in authoritarian regimes: Štefan Uher’s New Wave gem The Organ, and Ivan Ostrochovský’s chilly political parable Servants.

Make sure to explore Peter’s Klassiki Picks, available to subscribers until 23 April.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at http://klassiki.online.