The Klassiki Podcast

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.

Get in touch: [email protected] 

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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: [email protected].

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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 plenty to admire in Muratova’s unique approach to love triangles, cinematic mirrors, and the beauty of the building site. 

Watch along with us on Klassiki now! Subscribers can also check out Muratova’s early films Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell on the site. You can find more from Savina here.

Get in touch: [email protected].

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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 with his feature debut Katalin Varga, shot in Transylvania on a tiny, self-financed budget.

Peter has curated a selection of five titles for Klassiki that reflect his personal and professional history in the region. He sits down with host Sam Goff to talk about his time living and working in Slovakia and Hungary, and his picks, which include Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, the children’s animations of Czech trailblazer Hermína Týrlová, Péter Gothár’s cult Hungarian satire The Outpost, and two Slovak films that explore the place of the church in authoritarian regimes: Štefan Uher’s New Wave gem The Organ, and Ivan Ostrochovský’s chilly political parable Servants.

Make sure to explore Peter’s Klassiki Picks, available to subscribers until 23 April. 

Get in touch: [email protected].

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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 exactly does the New Wave mean after all this time? Which names get left out of the conversation? What happened after the Prague Spring? And what about the often overlooked Slovak aspect of this Czechoslovak phenomenon? 

To try and answer some of these questions, this week host Sam Goff speaks with Prague-based writer and programmer Christopher Small, co-founder and co-editor of the wonderful Outskirts Film Magazine, and an editor and writer for the Locarno Film Festival.

Make sure to check out Outskirts Film Magazine and Podcast.

Explore Klassiki’s collection of Czech and Slovak titles here.

Over on the Journal, we’ve got you covered for more writing on the New Wave, Věra Chytilová, Ester Krumbachová, and Juraj Herz.

Get in touch: [email protected].

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