The Klassiki Podcast

From Cranes to Cuba: how Kalatozov and Urusevsky reinvented Soviet cinema

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.

Shooting through tragedy: Shoghakat Vardanyan on 1489

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.
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One hundred years of Sergei Parajanov

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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Eisenstein and Ivan the Terrible today

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.
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The lonely voice of Aleksandr Sokurov

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.

Poland in the 80s, from Wajda to Kieślowski

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.

Dea Kulumbegashvili and Petar Valchanov at the London Film Festival

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.

The footballing fantasies of Sandro Koberidze

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.

Under the Volcano: Damian Kocur reimagines the Ukraine war drama

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.

Prefab pictures: cinema of the tower block with Owen Hatherley

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.