The Klassiki Podcast

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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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-founder of the Tashkent Film School. She also helps to run Women Watch Uzbekistan, a programme to encourage female filmmakers in the country. 
Julia tells us about the challenges and opportunities for independent filmmakers and audiences in Uzbekistan, from funding to censorship and more, as well as the situation in Central Asia more broadly.
Find out more about the Tashkent Film School here.
Watch Michael Borodin’s film Convenience Store on Klassiki now and read our interview with the director here.
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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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 century through the trauma of the war and the communist era that followed. To dig a little deeper into Andrzej Wajda’s history lessons, host Sam Goff is joined once again by Owen Hatherley – Eastern European architecture expert and Polish film and history aficionado – to discuss some of Wajda’s recurring themes and the highs (and lows) of his national history on film.
Watch our two-part Wajda tribute: Men of History and Literature on Film.
Read our essay on Wajda’s career and check out a watchlist of his films on the Klassiki Journal. 
Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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