The Klassiki Podcast

The films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are among the jewels in the crown of British cinema. One half of this national institution, Emeric Pressburger, was a Hungarian Jewish refugee – a background rarely commented on in discussions of the duo’s achievements. He brought Central European sensibilities to the British public – but how do we locate the Hungarian element in the Archers? 

This week, host Sam Goff welcomes back film historian and curator Ian Christie to the pod. Ian knew Pressburger at the end of his life and, along with the likes of Martin Scorsese, helped to kickstart the Powell and Pressburger revival in the late 1970s – so he was perfectly placed to discuss the life and times of this fascinating figure.

Subscribers can explore our own collection of classic Hungarian titles here. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

The Klassiki Podcast is back! To kick off our third season, we're stepping into the studio with Stephen and Timothy Quay, aka the Quay Brothers. 

The duo’s career spans five decades and has seen them craft features, shorts, music videos, adverts, and installations – all in their unmistakable signature style combining stop motion and live action, surrealist flourishes, and an eye for the macabre. Their new feature film, 20 years in the making, is an adaptation of The Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by the Polish author Bruno Schulz. And we’re delighted that the Brothers have curated a new season of titles for Klassiki subscribers, launching this Thursday 6th February.

Host Sam Goff sat down with the Brothers in their London studio, the Atelier Koninck, to discuss their long personal and creative relationship with Eastern Europe, from their student days in the 1960s to their latest film.  

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is screening at this year’s Kinoteka Film Festival: get your tickets here. Klassiki Picks with the Quay Brothers runs on the site from 13 February - 6 March. Sign up for a free 7-day trial at klassiki.online.

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.

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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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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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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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.

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.

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.

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.