The Klassiki Podcast

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 lates...

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 re...

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...

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...

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 tha...

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 Metro...

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’...

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 de...

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...

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 Co...

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 wi...

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 Dre...

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...

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 Fest...

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 t...

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.<...

When it comes to Central and Eastern European film, few movements loom larger than the Czechoslovak New Wave. Emerging in a period of political liberalisation and protest, the New Wave produced formally and politically audacious films before the so-called Prague Spring was crushed by a Soviet invasion in 1968. 2026 marks 60 years since the release of canonical films like Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains, and Jan Němec’s A Report on the Party and Guests. 

But what exactly does the New Wave mean after all this time? Which names get left out of the conve...

This week sees the return of one of the highlights of London’s cinematic calendar: BFI Flare, the largest LGBTQ+ film festival in Europe. One of the world premieres this year is To Dance is to Resist, a new documentary from German filmmaker and musician Julian Lautenbacher. Julian has spent five years travelling to Ukraine to document the personal and professional lives of Jay and Vol’demar, dancers in Kyiv’s vibrant underground queer club scene. His film captures a couple and a community finding their way through wartime hardship, juxtaposing striking scenes of dance performance with domestic portraits and vi...

For many cinephiles, the Central Asian states remain something of a blind spot. A case in point is Uzbekistan, whose film industry stretches back to the silent era, but which rarely comes on our radar in the Anglophone world. 

To provide some insight into what it’s like to do the work in this part of the world, this week host Sam Goff speaks with Julia Shaginurova. Julia, together with her partner Michael Borodin, is at the heart of efforts to build an independent film culture in Uzbekistan. She’s a producer, writer, and advocate and a co-fo...

This week sees the one hundredth birthday of Andrzej Wajda, the grand old man of Polish cinema. Until 26 March, Klassiki subscribers can watch Wajda’s epochal double header Man of Marble and Man of Iron, about the history of worker resistance in communist Poland, alongside two of his great literary adaptations: Siberian Lady Macbeth and The Promised Land. 

With a career running from the 1950s until the 2010s, it can be hard to know where to start with Wajda – but one thread running throughout his filmography is an exploration of Poland’s troubled modern history: from the 19th cent...

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for a profile of the Ukrainian filmmaker Roman Bondarchuk, whose deadpan, absurdist comedies cut through the myth-making around his country by investigating the “no man’s land” of his native Kherson region. Bondarchuk’s recent feature The Editorial Office was completed during the full-scale invasion by Russia and speaks with particular clarity to the challenges that Ukraine was facing before the war and will face after it.

Read the original piece here and watch Bondarchuk’s 2018 comedy Volcano on Klassiki now.

...

Welcome to season six of the Klassiki Podcast! We’re kicking things off by celebrating one of our favourites: Sergei Parajanov. Our new collection Perspectives on Parajanov, available now for subscribers, features the great man’s final two features, The Legend of Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib. We’re presenting the films alongside Zara Jian’s revelatory documentary, I Will Revenge this World with Love – S. Paradjanov (2024). Against the backdrop of the war on Ukraine and ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, Zara’s film explores the example of artistic and political courage that Parajanov set for the modern world. 

To kick off...

We’ve reached the end of season 5! Thank you to everyone for listening along. We’ll be back in 2026, but for now, happy holidays and speak to you soon.

To close out the season, we’re returning to the ever-expanding archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal and an essay on one of the great lost talents of the Soviet studio system. Aleksandr Askoldov only completed one feature film in his career, 1967’s excoriating anti-war drama Commissar, before falling foul of the censors and disappearing into obscurity. But the film remains a landmark for its deconstruction of Soviet m...

Friend of the show Alisa Goruleva is back on the pod this week for the latest edition of the Kino Club, our watch-a-long exploration of Klassiki’s film catalogue. As always, host Sam Goff set Alisa the task of picking a title from our library that she hadn’t seen before to discuss. Her choice this time around was very fitting: An Unusual Exhibition, the 1968 comedy of artistic frustration by the great Georgian filmmaker Eldar Shengelaia, who sadly passed away in August of this year. 

Alisa and Sam pay tribute to Shengelaia before exploring the film’s strange...

Listeners may remember our conversation earlier this year with Michael Brooke celebrating the centenary of Wojciech Has – one of Poland’s greatest and most misunderstood directors. We’re taking one last opportunity to honour Has’s hundredth anniversary year: right now until Christmas Day, subscribers can enjoy a restored version of his mind-bending masterpiece The Saragossa Manuscript. Adapted from a founding classic of Polish literature, the film presents a surreal odyssey across time and space that nests stories within stories to baffling and hypnotic effect. 

To unpack the film, Sam invited old friend of the show, film writer an...

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for a profile of the great Romanian director Lucian Pintilie, whose provocative, modernist work bridges the gap between communist-era filmmaking and the New Wave that has defined Romanian cinema in the 21st century. Subject to censorship and exile, Pintilie returned to his homeland in the 1990s to cement his legacy and influence a new generation of directors.

Read the original piece here and make sure to check out Pintilie’s classic satire Reconstruction as well as our collection of classic Roma...

Central Asia remains a great blindspot for many Western cinephiles – so we were thrilled to hear about an upcoming season in New York, hosted by the Asia Society in partnership with Anthology Film Archives. Eastern Notions is a celebration of the great Uzbek director Ali Khamraev, one of the true masters of Central Asian cinema, with more than 20 features in a career stretching back to the 1960s. Running from 20-23 November, the season highlights five of Khamraev’s fiction films, with the great man making a rare appearance in the States to attend in person.

To mark the...

14 years after her previous feature, Julia Loktev is back with a monumental new documentary project. My Undesirable Friends is her collective portrait of some of the last independent journalists working in Russia in the run-up to, and aftermath of, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Part One, titled Last Air in Moscow, was shot entirely on iPhone during Loktev’s trips to the Russian capital. Over more than five immersive hours, we follow journalists from the TV channel Rain and other oppositional outlets as they struggle to keep pace with Russia’s descent into the abyss, from labelling jour...

This week, we’re reopening the Klassiki Kino Club, our watch-along exploration of Klassiki’s ever-expanding catalogue. In the hot seat this time around is Ally Pitts, host of the long-running Russian and Soviet Movies Podcast and confirmed Eastern European film aficionado. Ally’s choice comes from Azerbaijan: Orkhan Aghazadeh’s 2024 documentary The Return of the Projectionist, a portrait of cinephilia and friendship across generations. 

Ally and host Sam Goff get into Aghazadeh’s playful blend of observation and performance, the state of cinema in the post-Soviet space, and how to make a nostalgic film without being sentimental...

As every film fan knows, October is horror season. And while eastern Europe these days is full of horror filmmakers who can mix it with the best of them, this wasn’t always the case: under communism, the genre often struggled to get past state censors. But the idea that there was no horror produced behind the Iron Curtain is a myth. There was in fact a rich tradition in the sixties and seventies, drawing on national folklore, literary sources, and the region’s traumatic recent history to chilling effect. On Klassiki, you can currently stream a Halloween double head...

The 69th edition of the London Film Festival has just rolled through the capital’s cinemas, bringing a host of filmmaking talents in its wake. Sam headed down to the festival press circuit to speak to two directors in town with their latest films. First we hear from North Macedonia’s Teona Strugar Mitevska, who has been a shining light of Balkan filmmaking for over 20 years. Her latest film is perhaps her most ambitious yet: Mother, a punkish take on Mother Teresa starring Noomi Rapace, which had its premiere in Venice this summer.

Then we catch up with...

Welcome back! It’s season five of the Klassiki podcast. We’ve got ten more great episodes lined up for you, featuring some exciting interviews, historical deep dives, and a Halloween special later this month. In the meantime, get in touch with us at podcast@klassiki.online. 

We’re kicking things off with some science fiction. Boris and Arkady Strugatsky were brothers who dominated postwar Soviet sci-fi with their philosophical, subversive, and hugely popular novels and short stories. The Strugatskys also had a second life on screen, collaborating with a wide array of directors on adaptations of their w...

We’ve reached the end season four! Thank you as always for listening along. We’ll be back in the autumn, so look out for that and make sure you’re subscribed in your podcast app of choice so you don’t miss out.

In the meantime, we want to hear from you. Do you have questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions for the show? You can now email them to us at podcast@klassiki.online. Get in touch ahead of the new season.

We’re closing out season four with a look at a fascinating and misund...

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for a profile of the great Estonian actor Jüri Järvet – a cult hero of Soviet and Baltic film who overcame family trauma as a young man before bursting onto the international scene in the 1970s. In the space of just a few years, Jarvet helped to modernise Estonian cinema, worked with Tarkovsky, and played King Lear to huge critical and popular acclaim. Despite this, his story is not well known in the West.

Read the original piece here and wa...

This week, we’re launching 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 prolific British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers, whose latest feature, the post-apocalyptic tale Mare’s Nest, premieres in competition at the Locarno Film Festival this week. With that in mind, Ben has picked a fascinating quartet of titles for Klassiki: four films that explore the end of the world, whether literal or metaphorical, featuring sci-fi weirdness, nuclear paranoia, and the threat of social collapse.

Critic, researcher, and friend of the show Alisa Goruleva is back on the pod this week for the second edition of the Kino Club, our watch-a-long exploration of Klassiki’s ever-expanding catalogue. Host Sam Goff asked Alisa to pick another film from our library that she hadn’t seen before to discuss. This time around, she plumped for Andrzej Munk’s 1958 war satire Eroica, a cynical deconstruction of the myths of military heroism. 

Alisa and Sam discuss Munk’s tragically short career, his place among the titans of post-war Polish film, and Eroica’s blend of black humour, des...

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal. Today is the seventieth birthday of one of the true greats: Béla Tarr, Hungary’s maestro of slow cinema melancholy. So, to celebrate, host Sam Goff is reading from our companion to the life and times of this icon of eastern European film – from his early days as a schoolboy anarchist to his position as a grandee of world cinema.

Read the original piece here and make sure to explore our collection of Hungarian titles. Sign up for a free 7...

2025 is the centenary year of one of Soviet cinema’s true greats: Marlen Khutsiev, whose films from the fifties and sixties captured the excitement of the post-war years. If there was such a thing as the Soviet New Wave, then Khutsiev was its beating heart. In films like I Am Twenty and July Rain, he borrowed from the neorealists in Italy and iconoclasts in France to depict a society on the brink of transformation. 

To celebrate Khutsiev in his 100th year, host Sam Goff is joined by Boris Nelepo, programmer, critic, and Co-Head of Programming at the Doc...

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal. Today, host Sam Goff reads an essay about the work of one of Baltic cinema’s great innovators, Rolands Kalniņš, aka the Latvian Godard, whose playfully political films staged a colourful protest against Soviet occupation. This piece was written by friend of the show Joshua Polanski, a critic specialising in Baltic film who listeners may remember from our episode in season three about Jonas Mekas.

Read the original piece here and read more from Joshua on Baltic film on his site...

This week we’re trying something new on the pod: the first edition of the Klassiki Kino Club. We wanted to find a way of championing our ever-growing library of films with our listeners. So we asked a friend of the show to pick a title available on Klassiki that they had never seen before to watch for the first time – and then to jump on a call to offer their reactions and reflections. 

Joining us today is Alisa Goruleva, a Russian film critic and researcher based in Berlin who’s recently been writing some wonderful pieces for the...