The Klassiki Podcast

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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Welcome back! It’s season five of the Klassiki podcast. We’ve got ten more great episodes lined up for you, featuring some exciting interviews, historical deep dives, and a Halloween special later this month. In the meantime, get in touch with us at [email protected]. 

We’re kicking things off with some science fiction. Boris and Arkady Strugatsky were brothers who dominated postwar Soviet sci-fi with their philosophical, subversive, and hugely popular novels and short stories. The Strugatskys also had a second life on screen, collaborating with a wide array of directors on adaptations of their work – most famously Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. You can’t really understand eastern bloc sci-fi without the Strugatsky Brothers. But who were they, where did their remarkable visions come from, and why have their proven so appealing to so many filmmakers? 

To answer these questions, host Sam Goff speaks with Marat Grinberg,​Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, who’s written extensively on Soviet sci-fi and the Jewish experience under communism. They discuss the Strugatskys’ traumatic childhoods, the ways their work has been transformed by directors from the 60s to the Putin era, and how their Jewishness informed their work. 

Subscribers can watch two Strugatsky adaptations on Klassiki now: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse and Grigori Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. 

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We’ve reached the end season four! Thank you as always for listening along. We’ll be back in the autumn, so look out for that and make sure you’re subscribed in your podcast app of choice so you don’t miss out.

In the meantime, we want to hear from you. Do you have questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions for the show? You can now email them to us at [email protected]. Get in touch ahead of the new season.

We’re closing out season four with a look at a fascinating and misunderstood part of Ukraine: the Donbas. This resource-rich region in the east of the country was celebrated as the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, but since 2014 has become synonymous with destruction and war after more than a decade of Russian aggression and occupation. It’s a region that has been subject to much controversy, within Ukraine as well as internationally, but its vibrant and diverse history is too often overlooked.

It’s this history that Victoria Donovan has set out to capture in her fantastic new book, Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East. Victoria draws on her extensive travel and research in Donbas to move past the clichés and give a human perspective on events. Host Sam Goff sat down with her to discuss the book, and to explore how film has been used and abused in creating an image of the region.

We’ve put together a playlist of some of the films discussed in this episode for Klassiki subscribers, which you can find here.

Buy Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East here.

Read an interview with Freefilmers here and explore their recent work here.

Explore documentary material from the Donbas in the Urban Media Archive 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 Estonian actor Jüri Järvet – a cult hero of Soviet and Baltic film who overcame family trauma as a young man before bursting onto the international scene in the 1970s. In the space of just a few years, Jarvet helped to modernise Estonian cinema, worked with Tarkovsky, and played King Lear to huge critical and popular acclaim. Despite this, his story is not well known in the West.

Read the original piece here and watch Järvet’s classic turns in Madness and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

This week, we’re launching 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 prolific British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers, whose latest feature, the post-apocalyptic tale Mare’s Nest, premieres in competition at the Locarno Film Festival this week. With that in mind, Ben has picked a fascinating quartet of titles for Klassiki: four films that explore the end of the world, whether literal or metaphorical, featuring sci-fi weirdness, nuclear paranoia, and the threat of social collapse.

Host Sam Goff sat down with Ben to discuss the appeal of this End Times cinema, the unique nature of eastern European sci-fi, children on film, and the enduring influence of Aleksandr Sokurov on his work. 

Make sure to explore Ben’s Klassiki Picks, available to subscribers from 7 August. 

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

Critic, researcher, and friend of the show Alisa Goruleva is back on the pod this week for the second edition of the Kino Club, our watch-a-long exploration of Klassiki’s ever-expanding catalogue. Host Sam Goff asked Alisa to pick another film from our library that she hadn’t seen before to discuss. This time around, she plumped for Andrzej Munk’s 1958 war satire Eroica, a cynical deconstruction of the myths of military heroism. 

Alisa and Sam discuss Munk’s tragically short career, his place among the titans of post-war Polish film, and Eroica’s blend of black humour, despair, and disillusioned humanism.

Watch along with us on Klassiki now! Make sure to check out Alisa’s writing over on the Klassiki Journal, and leave us a review to let us know which films you’d like us to tackle next in the Kino Club. 

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For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal. Today is the seventieth birthday of one of the true greats: Béla Tarr, Hungary’s maestro of slow cinema melancholy. So, to celebrate, host Sam Goff is reading from our companion to the life and times of this icon of eastern European film – from his early days as a schoolboy anarchist to his position as a grandee of world cinema.

Read the original piece here and make sure to explore our collection of Hungarian titles. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

2025 is the centenary year of one of Soviet cinema’s true greats: Marlen Khutsiev, whose films from the fifties and sixties captured the excitement of the post-war years. If there was such a thing as the Soviet New Wave, then Khutsiev was its beating heart. In films like I Am Twenty and July Rain, he borrowed from the neorealists in Italy and iconoclasts in France to depict a society on the brink of transformation. 

To celebrate Khutsiev in his 100th year, host Sam Goff is joined by Boris Nelepo, programmer, critic, and Co-Head of Programming at the DocLisboa Film Festival, who befriended the filmmaker at the end of his life. 

Watch Khutsiev’s classic films I Am Twenty and Spring on Zarechnaya Street on Klassiki now and read Boris’s tribute to his friend here.

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For this episode, we’re dipping back in to the archive of writing on the Klassiki Journal. Today, host Sam Goff reads an essay about the work of one of Baltic cinema’s great innovators, Rolands Kalniņš, aka the Latvian Godard, whose playfully political films staged a colourful protest against Soviet occupation. This piece was written by friend of the show Joshua Polanski, a critic specialising in Baltic film who listeners may remember from our episode in season three about Jonas Mekas.

Read the original piece here and read more from Joshua on Baltic film on his site. And make sure to explore Klassiki’s collection of titles from the Baltic states. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

This week we’re trying something new on the pod: the first edition of the Klassiki Kino Club. We wanted to find a way of championing our ever-growing library of films with our listeners. So we asked a friend of the show to pick a title available on Klassiki that they had never seen before to watch for the first time – and then to jump on a call to offer their reactions and reflections. 

Joining us today is Alisa Goruleva, a Russian film critic and researcher based in Berlin who’s recently been writing some wonderful pieces for the Klassiki Journal. Her choice of film was Confidence (1980) by Hungary’s István Szabó. Alisa and host Sam Goff get into the film’s take on gendered power dynamics and its depiction of a world at war.

Watch along with us on Klassiki now! Make sure to check out Alisa’s writing over on the Klassiki Journal, and leave us a review to let us know which films you’d like us to tackle next in the Kino Club. 

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.