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PODCAST

The Klassiki Podcast

Delve into the wide world of Eastern European film with the Klassiki Podcast. Featuring interviews, roundtable discussions, recorded essays, and more, we take you beyond the headlines to explore the past, present, and future of this fascinating region. Sign up to Klassiki today to gain access to our ever-evolving library of classic and contemporary titles, as well as filmmaker interviews, video essays and introductions, programme notes, and much more.

tv & film film interviews

All Episodes

49:35

Woman on the edge: the world of Leida Laius

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/10/12

Estonian director Leida Laius was an unsung pioneer. Working from the sixties until the fall of communism, her films are striking for their empathetic exploration of the lives of women, from motherhood and marriage to sexuality. While she’s heralded in her homeland, like many female directors, her international reputation hasn’t kept pace with her talents – although there are welcome signs that this is changing, with a slew of new restorations and repertory screenings in recent years.One such

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35:34

Sergei Loznitsa takes us inside the Imperium

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/10/06

Welcome listeners old and new to season eight of the Klassiki Podcast. We’ve got ten more episodes coming up for you to take us up to the festive season, with returning guests and new voices, covering the great and the good of Eastern European film. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss an episode. Sergei Loznitsa remains one of the biggest draws in Eastern European cinema today. The Ukrainian filmmaker moves freely between fiction and both observational and archival documentaries in his

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34:35

Locarno 2026 festival report: Florin Șerban, Isabelle...

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/08/17

That’s a wrap on season seven of the podcast. As always, thank you for listening along. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss us when we return for season eight in the autumn. And please, leave us a five-star rating and share the show far and wide so we can continue to grow. Thank you. The 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival has just come to a close. Every year, this resort town on the shores of Lake Maggiore hosts to one of the world’s most rewarding festivals, balancing arthouse

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56:10

Films of the forest, from Tarkovsky to Kurosawa

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/08/10

The forest is one of the prevailing symbols of Russia and its former imperial holdings: from the Baltic to the taiga to the Pacific. But how has the forest informed Russia’s sense of itself and its place in the world? This is the question at the heart of Sophie Pinkham’s new book, The Oak and The Larch: A Forest History of Russia and its Empires: a cultural and environmental history about the role of the forest in making and resisting the Russian and Soviet states, stretching from the Bronze Age to

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39:31

Mark Cousins tells the story of documentary film

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/08/03

Among his many achievements, the Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins is perhaps best known for his sprawling documentaries charting the history of cinema: The Story of Film: An Odyssey, originally released in 2011, and Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema, from 2019. Now, Mark is back with a third entry in this pantheon: The Story of Documentary Film. Like its predecessors, it's an epic undertaking, with 16 hour-long chapters running from the 19th century to the present day and ranging all

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45:16

The most important art: Ian Christie’s journey...

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/07/27

Long time listeners of the show will be familiar with the film historian Ian Christie, who’s joined us to discuss topics ranging from Aleksandr Sokurov to Powell and Pressburger, the Soviet avant-garde to The Saragossa Manuscript. His new book, The Most Important Art: Exploring the Hidden Histories of Russian and Soviet Cinema, collects writings and interviews from decades of pioneering work on subjects ranging from the silent era to contemporary figures like Andrei Zvyagintsev. Ian spent the final

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41:23

Otar Iosseliani’s fables of modern life

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/07/20

Renowned in his native Georgia as one of the nation’s greatest filmmakers, Otar Iosseliani spent the majority of his career in his adoptive home of France after emigrating in the early eighties. The news that Cinema Guild will be releasing a slate of restorations has occasioned an extensive retrospective in New York, where audiences can acquaint themselves with the director’s bustling long takes, mordant satire, and anarchic sympathy for the drunks, losers, and misfits of both Soviet communism and

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33:31

BONUS: Golden Apricot festival report

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/07/16

We have a bonus episode for you this week. Host Sam is in Yerevan, Armenia, attending the Golden Apricot International Film Festival – always a highlight of the year for us here at Klassiki. The festival is renowned for its championing of films from the Caucasus and Near East, and for its engagement with the Armenian diaspora. Sam took the opportunity to sit down with Savina Petkova and Flavia Dima –two of our favourite critics (and Klassiki Podcast alumni) – to discuss some of the films they’ve

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12:51

Unravelling the twisted crime films of Corneliu...

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/07/13

For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal for an essay on the Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu. The most elusive of the founding fathers of the Romanian New Wave, Porumboiu’s postmodern comedies play on questions of language and identity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his crime dramas, Police Adjective and The Whistlers, where genre thrills undergo playful revisions to the point of absurdity. As Porumboiu completes work on his first feature

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41:11

The Klassiki Kino Club: Tough Kids

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/07/06

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

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52:00

Beyond Mr Nobody: documentary under Putin

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/06/29

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

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50:50

Boris Barnet: poet of the outskirts

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/06/22

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

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38:41

Valeska Grisebach returns with The Dreamed Adventure

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/06/15

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

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14:52

The moral maze of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/04/20

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

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34:24

Artavazd Pelechian: poetry at a distance

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/04/13

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

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41:55

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

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/04/06

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

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43:14

Peter Strickland heads back to the East

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/03/30

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

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53:41

The Czechoslovak New Wave and beyond

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/03/23

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

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32:51

To dance is to resist: queer life in wartime Ukraine

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/03/16

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

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40:33

Building film culture in Uzbekistan

The Klassiki Podcast ·

2026/03/09

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

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74 results

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