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. 

Get in touch: [email protected].

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

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: [email protected].

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

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: [email protected].

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

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.

Get in touch: [email protected] 

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

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.

Get in touch: [email protected].

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