The Klassiki Podcast

The Klassiki Kino Club: Tough Kids

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.
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Beyond Mr Nobody: documentary under Putin

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.  
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Boris Barnet: poet of the outskirts

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. 
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Valeska Grisebach returns with The Dreamed Adventure

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.
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The moral maze of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog

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 
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Artavazd Pelechian: poetry at a distance

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.
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The Klassiki Kino Club: Getting to Know the Big Wide World

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.
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Peter Strickland heads back to the East

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. 
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The Czechoslovak New Wave and beyond

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 conversation? What happened after the Prague Spring? And what about the often overlooked Slovak aspect of this Czechoslovak phenomenon? 
To try and answer some of these questions, this week host Sam Goff speaks with Prague-based writer and programmer Christopher Small, co-founder and co-editor of the wonderful Outskirts Film Magazine, and an editor and writer for the Locarno Film Festival.
Make sure to check out Outskirts Film Magazine and Podcast.
Explore Klassiki’s collection of Czech and Slovak titles here.
Over on the Journal, we’ve got you covered for more writing on the New Wave, Věra Chytilová, Ester Krumbachová, and Juraj Herz.
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To dance is to resist: queer life in wartime Ukraine

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 visions of a capital city under attack.  
Ahead of the festival, host Sam Goff spoke with Julian about his experiences working in Kyiv, the idea of dance culture as a form of resistance during invasion, and the cultural connections and contrasts between Germany and Ukraine. 
Get tickets for screenings of To Dance is to Resist on 28 and 29 March here.
BFI Flare runs from 18-29 March. Explore the festival programme here.
Explore Klassiki’s queer film collection here. 
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