The Klassiki Podcast

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 tradition.

In their new edited volume The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism, scholars Masha Shpolberg (Bard College) and Anastasia Kostina (Columbia) argue that in the face of growing repression, the 21st century has actually seen a boom in Russian non-fiction cinema: from new film schools and festivals to formal experimentation and theoretical debates, inspired by a desire for objectivity in the face of media manipulation from an increasingly coercive regime. This week, host Sam Goff welcomes Masha and Anastasia onto the pod to discuss the history and the role of documentary film in Putin’s Russia.

Check out Masha’s and Anastasia’s book here. 

Explore our collection of contemporary Russian documentaries here.  

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

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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 in their first issue. 

To understand this shift, this week host Sam Goff speaks with Boris Nelepo, who listeners might remember from our episode last year on Marlen Khutsiev. Boris is a programmer and critic from Moscow now based in Lisbon, where he is Co-Head of programming at the DocLisboa International Film Festival. Sam and Boris take on the long, difficult sweep of Barnet’s career, which stretched from silent comedies to wartime thrillers and sixties road movies, touching on the utopian spirit of his films and the loneliness that contributed to his tragic early death from suicide in 1965.

Watch Boris Barnet’s films Girl with a Hatbox and Outskirts on Klassiki now. 

Read Boris Nelepo’s writing on Barnet here. 

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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 Adventure, which arrives nine years after her previous feature Western. The Dreamed Adventure sees the director return to Bulgaria, Grisebach crafting a brilliant subversion of her genre influences with the story of Veska, a female archaeologist who gets tangled in the criminal underworld of her small border town. 

Host Sam Goff sits down with Valeska Grisebach to discuss her attachment to Bulgaria, her understanding of gender and genre, and the incredible real life stories that informed her unique take on the gangster film.

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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 Commandments, all set in the same Warsaw tower block complex, this intimate epic of everyday life arrived at the end of the communist era and asked penetrating questions about the spiritual and material direction of Polish society as transformation loomed.

Read the original piece here and watch Kieślowski’s Dekalog spin-off feature A Short Film about Love on Klassiki now. 

Find out more about Poland in the eighties with our companion piece and explore Kieślowski’s career here.

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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 been put together by an old friend of Klassiki: Sona Karapoghosyan, a program curator at Yerevan’s Golden Apricot Film Festival. So this week, host Sam Goff asked Sona to join him in introducing the poetic world of Pelechian’s films.

Interstitial Cinema: the films of Artavazd Pelechian, screens over two consecutive nights this week at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London: Tuesday 14th and Wednesday 15th. Find all the information you need, book tickets, and read an essay by Sona here.

Get in touch: podcast@klassiki.online.

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