One hundred years of Marlen Khutsiev

Regular listeners will know that we love an anniversary here on the Klassiki Podcast. And 2025 is the centenary year of one of Soviet cinema’s true greats. Marlen Khutsiev was perhaps the most influential director of the period in the fifties and sixties known as the Thaw, when Soviet culture flourished in the relative freedom of the post-Stalin 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 youthful iconoclasts in France to depict a society on the brink of transformation.

To celebrate Khutsiev in his 100th year, and to figure out his place in film history, host Sam Goff is joined by Boris Nelepo, a programmer and critic from Moscow now based in Lisbon, where he is Co-Head of Programming at the DocLisboa International Film Festival. Boris knew Khutsiev towards the end of his life and has written movingly on the director’s significance to Soviet and Russian cinema.

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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Intro music by Juliet Merchant.