The Klassiki Podcast

2025 is the centenary year of Wojciech Jerzy Has – one of Poland’s greatest and most misunderstood filmmakers. A full retrospective of Has’s films is currently underway across the UK: from his surrealist masterpieces The Saragossa Manuscript and The Hourglass Sanatorium, to his never-before-screened shorts. To set the scene for this retrospective, host Sam Goff speaks with its curator, Polish film expert Michael Brooke, about Has’s peculiar place in Polish film history, his unique approach to literary adaptations, and the dreamworlds he conjured onscreen.

You can find information about all the Has screenings at this year’s Kinoteka Film Festival, both in London and on tour throughout the UK, on the festival site.Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Artist, guru, witch, muse. The cinematic polymath Ester Krumbachová was an essential figure behind many of the classics of the Czech New Wave. But Krumbachová herself remains an elusive figure, marginalised in histories of female filmmaking.

In recent years, this has begun to change. Krumbachová’s sole directorial effort, the romantic parody Murdering the Devil, has been restored and screened worldwide. It’s coming to the UK this month, with three screenings as part of this year’s Borderlines Film Festival, in Hereford, Ludlow, and Malvern, and Klassiki subscribers can watch the restoration on the site now. Host Sam Goff sat down with writer and curator Rachel Pronger to discuss Krumbachová’s role in the Czech New Wave, her fall from grace, and what her work can teach us about feminist filmmaking today.

Get your tickets for the Borderlines Film Festival screenings of Murdering the Devil. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

In this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for an essay on the Soviet-Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, written and read by host Sam Goff. One of the most significant female filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet system, Shepitko’s career was cut short at the age of just 41 when she was killed in a car crash while location scouting for her fifth feature. Her surviving work reflects her experiences as a child of war and dislocation and remains vital to our understanding of the post-Soviet world.

Read the original piece here and make sure to explore our collection of classic Soviet titles. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

The films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are among the jewels in the crown of British cinema. One half of this national institution, Emeric Pressburger, was a Hungarian Jewish refugee – a background rarely commented on in discussions of the duo’s achievements. He brought Central European sensibilities to the British public – but how do we locate the Hungarian element in the Archers? 

This week, host Sam Goff welcomes back film historian and curator Ian Christie to the pod. Ian knew Pressburger at the end of his life and, along with the likes of Martin Scorsese, helped to kickstart the Powell and Pressburger revival in the late 1970s – so he was perfectly placed to discuss the life and times of this fascinating figure.

Subscribers can explore our own collection of classic Hungarian titles here. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

The Klassiki Podcast is back! To kick off our third season, we're stepping into the studio with Stephen and Timothy Quay, aka the Quay Brothers. 

The duo’s career spans five decades and has seen them craft features, shorts, music videos, adverts, and installations – all in their unmistakable signature style combining stop motion and live action, surrealist flourishes, and an eye for the macabre. Their new feature film, 20 years in the making, is an adaptation of The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by the Polish author Bruno Schulz. And we’re delighted that the Brothers have curated a new season of titles for Klassiki subscribers, launching this Thursday 6th February.

Host Sam Goff sat down with the Brothers in their London studio, the Atelier Koninck, to discuss their long personal and creative relationship with Eastern Europe, from their student days in the 1960s to their latest film.  

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is screening at this year’s Kinoteka Film Festival: get your tickets here. Klassiki Picks with the Quay Brothers runs on the site from 13 February - 6 March. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

We’ve reached the end of the second season of the show! Thank you to everyone who’s listened along so far. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a five-star review or a comment on your podcast app of choice. We’ll be back in 2025 with a new season, bigger and better than before.

For the final episode of the season, we’re dipping back in to the archive of the Klassiki Journal for an essay on the groundbreaking collaboration between director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei Urusevsky. Over just seven years and three films, the duo turned Soviet cinema on its head with their revolutionary cinematography and depth of feeling, winning the Palme d’Or along the way. 

Read the original piece here and make sure to explore our collection of classic Soviet titles, including Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Host Sam Goff speaks to Armenian director Shoghakat Vardanyan about her remarkable debut, 1489. In 2020, Vardanyan’s 21-year-old brother went missing days into the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan. With no prior filmmaking experience, Shoghakat picked up her phone and started recording herself and her parents as they began a gruelling quest for information. The resulting film is a portrait of family grief and resilience, in which we watch a young woman learning to express herself through film in real time. On this week’s episode, Shoghakat talks about the emotional experience of making the film and becoming a celebrated director by accident. 

1489 is screening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London on Saturday 7 December as part of the inaugural London Armenian Film Festival. Buy tickets for the screening here.

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

2024 marks one hundred years since the birth of the great Sergei Parajanov, who turned Soviet cinema on its head in masterpieces like Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Colour of Pomegranates. Persecuted for his experimental artistic approach and queer identity, his work still provokes vital questions about post-Soviet culture.

What exactly does Parajanov mean today? To answer this question, host Sam Goff speaks with Carmen Gray, a critic and programmer specialising in the cinema of eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Read Carmen’s beginner’s guide to Parajanov here and head over to Klassiki to watch Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Hakob Hovnatanyan now.

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2024 marks 80 years since the release of the great Sergei Eisenstein’s final, unfinished masterpiece: Ivan the Terrible. Commissioned by Stalin himself to make a biopic celebrating the bloodthirsty 16th-century tsar, Eisenstein instead produced a complex portrait of paranoia and power that remains relevant to this day.

To get to the heart of Eisenstein’s Ivan, host Sam Goff speaks with Joan Neuberger, Professor Emerita at the University of Texas and the author of This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia.

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

This month, audiences in London have been revisiting the works of one of Russian cinema’s grandees, with a retrospective of the films of Aleksandr Sokurov, organised by the cultural institute Pushkin House. Best known in the West for his 2002 epic Russian Ark, Sokurov is arguably the last living embodiment of the classic Russian arthouse director, in all its contradictions. 

To make sense of Sokurov in 2024, host Sam Goff sits down with film historian and curator Ian Christie, who has been working on and with the director since the 1980s. 

Find out more about the Sokurov season and Pushkin House here. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

In this guide, first published on the Klassiki Journal and written and read by host Sam Goff, we introduce the cinema of Poland in the 1980s. The last decade of communist rule was a period marked by the brutality of martial law, but also the emergence of critical new voices and masterpieces from figures such as Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, and Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Read the original piece here and make sure to explore our collection of Polish titles. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

This month saw the 68th edition of the London Film Festival hit the capital’s cinemas. Host Sam Goff went down to the festival press circuit to get hold of two of Eastern Europe’s finest: Georgia’s Dea Kulumbegashvili, whose abortion drama April has been turning heads since it won the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival; and Bulgaria’s Petar Valchanov, whose latest stranger-than-fiction tale recreates a bizarre episode from his nation’s recent history involving psychics and alien artefacts... 

Watch Petar’s 2019 drama The Father on Klassiki now. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Georgian filmmaker Sandro Koberidze joins host Sam Goff to chat about his forthcoming film Dry Leaf and the hidden connections between his two great passions: cinema and football.

Watch Sandro’s award-winning What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? on Klassiki now. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Host Sam Goff sits down with Polish filmmaker Damian Kocur to discuss his new Ukraine war drama Under the Volcano. The film follows a Ukrainian family who are vacationing in Tenerife when the full-scale war breaks out back home, leaving them stranded on the island. Damian explains how he applied his idiosyncratic filmmaking technique to this story of grief and dislocation, and how the war has affected both Ukrainian filmmakers and their neighbours in eastern Europe.

Watch Damian’s debut feature Bread and Salt on Klassiki now. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

The Klassiki Podcast is back for our second season. We’re kicking off with an interview with author Owen Hatherley about the history of the tower block on screen. Widely understood in the West as symbolic of the grey monotony of life behind the Iron Curtain, the prefab tower block remains misunderstood more than three decades after the fall of communism. 

To get past the clichés, host Sam Goff sat down with Owen to discuss five films set in and around these mass housing monoliths, from five different directors – including iconic auteurs Béla Tarr, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and Věra Chytilová – to see how the image of the block changed over time.

Check out Owen’s books about his journeys through Eastern Europe, Landscapes of Communism and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

In this profile, written by critic and curator Rachel Pronger and first published on the Klassiki Journal, we introduce you to one of the most consequential and misunderstood figures in Soviet film history: Yuliya Solntseva. A silent star who became one half of Ukraine’s most influential creative marriage but whose place in history has been obscured for too long.

Klassiki subscribers can watch Solntseva’s iconic performances in Aelita and Earth now. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Host Sam Goff is joined by two representatives of the so-called “film movement” in Georgia – Keti Machavariani of the Georgian Film Institute, and Keto Kipiani of the Documentary Association of Georgia – to discuss cinema’s place in the ongoing protest movement against the increasing authoritarianism of the country’s government. They explain the situation on the ground for filmmakers and how the film world relates to the wider protest movement fighting for Georgia’s future.

Klassiki subscribers can explore our collection of Georgian titles here. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

In this guide, first published on the Klassiki Journal and written and read by host Sam Goff, we introduce the cinema of the Soviet Thaw. As a new era of cultural freedom swept the USSR after the death of Stalin, iconic directors like Mikhail Kalatozov and Marlen Khutsiev created a new cinematic language defined by sincerity and stylistic innovation.

Read the original piece here and make sure to explore our collections of classic Soviet and cult sixties film. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Dan Bird is one of the world’s leading specialists on cult cinema from Eastern Europe. His work in restoration and distribution has played a key role in preserving the legacies of iconic filmmakers like Andrzej Żuławski and Sergei Parajanov. He joins host Sam Goff to discuss a career spent traversing Eastern Europe in search of hidden gems.

Klassiki subscribers can watch a cult cinema playlist inspired by Dan’s adventures here. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

In this piece, first published on the Klassiki Journal by critic Sonya Vseliubska and read here by host Oliver Hunt, we introduce the wild world of the Czech New Wave, one of the most influential movements in Central and Eastern European cinema. Blending aesthetic and philosophical innovations from France and Italy, the New Wave gave us legendary figures like Věra Chytilová, František Vláčil, and Miloš Forman.

Read Sonya’s piece here and make sure to explore our collection of Central European film. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.