The Klassiki Podcast

Sergei Parajanov in love and war

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 the season, Zara Jian joins host Sam Goff to discuss the eternal appeal of Parajanov, where his cosmopolitan work sits in a nationalist world, and her personal response to his late-career masterpieces. 
Watch I Will Revenge this World with Love - S. Paradjanov on Klassiki until 12 March as part of our collection Perspectives on Parajanov. 
Listen to our episode on Parajanov’s centenary here.
Read Daniel Bird’s take on Parajanov’s groundbreaking short Hakob Hovnatanyan here.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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Rewriting history in Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar

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 mythology and its treatment of the USSR’s Jewish population. Klassiki favourite, writer and researcher Alisa Goruleva explores how Askoldov ended up on the wrong side of the censors but the right side of history.
Read the original piece here and watch Commissar on Klassiki now.
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The Klassiki Kino Club: An Unusual Exhibition

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 blend of tones, its disorienting narrative style, and its treatment of the eternal figure of the downtrodden artist. 
Watch along with us on Klassiki now! Subscribers will find a host of bonus materials that we put together as part of our celebration of Shengelaia’s 90th birthday a few years ago – including an interview with the great man himself.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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Deciphering The Saragossa Manuscript

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 and historian Ian Christie, to join him in deciphering the Manuscript: from the source novel to the film’s daring formal tricks, its place in sixties counterculture, its long critical re-evaluation, and its profound influence on everyone from Luis Buñuel to David Lynch. 
Watch The Saragossa Manuscript on Klassiki until 25th December. 
Listen to our episode on the life and times of Wojciech Has here.
Read Daniel Bird’s essay on Has’s surreal literary adaptations here.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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Lucian Pintilie: godfather of the Romanian New Wave

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 Romanian titles.
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Eastern notions: celebrating Ali Khamraev

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 occasion, host Sam Goff spoke with the season’s curator Inney Prakash about Khamraev’s diverse body of work, his relationship with more famous Soviet icons like Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov, and the question of curating Central Asian film. 
Listeners in New York, don’t miss out: Eastern Notions runs from 20-23 November at Asia Society and Anthology Film Archives. 
Read our 2021 interview with Ali Khamraev for further insight into his long and fruitful career. 
Klassiki subscribers can watch Khamraev’s poetic and autobiographical film I Remember You on the site now.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part One – Last Air in Moscow

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 journalists as “foreign agents” to outright assault and arrest.
Host Sam Goff sat down with Julia to find out how the film evolved over time, the relationship between her work in fiction and documentary, and where she’s at with Part Two of the project, entitled Exile, which follows our journalist protagonists after they are forced to flee Russia.
Last Air in Moscow is currently screening in select locations across the US. Find your nearest screening here.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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The Klassiki Kino Club: The Return of the Projectionist

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.  
Watch along with us on Klassiki now! Subscribers will also find our exclusive video interview with Aghazadeh. Check out Ally’s podcast here.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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Horror behind the Iron Curtain

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 header of cult classic Soviet films. Viy, by Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, is famous among genre fans as the greatest of all Soviet horror titles, while Valeri Rubinchik’s The Savage Hunt of King Stakh is a criminally under-seen gothic gem from Belarus. 
In the spirit of the season, this week Sam speaks with Miriam Balanescu, a film writer and critic with a special interest in all things ghoulish. They discussed the horror history of countries like Poland and Czechia, the political subtext of genre filmmaking under communism, and what ‘folk horror’ meant in the Soviet context. 
Don’t miss our Halloween double header, now showing on Klassiki.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online 
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Mother Teresa and Persian poetry at the London Film Festival

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 acclaimed Iranian director Sharham Mokri, who travelled to neighbouring Tajikistan for his latest film, Black Rabbit, White Rabbit, which screened in competition in London. With the help of interpreter Iante Roach, Shahram and Sam discussed the deep links between Iranian and Tajik cinema – including how jumping between the two countries can help filmmakers from both to avoid growing censorship at home. 
Read our interview with Teona on her previous film 21 Days Until the End of the World here.
Read Tajik filmmaker Anisa Sabiri on the influence of Iranian cinema in Tajikistan here. 
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