Dis­cov­er a new stream­ing ser­vice with unseen films by women directors

As the clo­sure of cin­e­mas in 2020 threw a span­ner in the works of the film indus­try, the release sched­ule con­tin­ued its for­ward march into the future at a snail’s pace. While a few new films did come out on stream­ing plat­forms, most dis­trib­u­tors chose to wait until a return to some kind of nor­mal­cy and hope for a cin­e­ma release.

Many movie lovers, stuck at home with lit­tle new to see, quite nat­u­ral­ly turned to the reas­sur­ing hum of binge-wor­thy TV series. Oth­ers – the most des­per­ate of all – found them­selves with way too much free time on their hands and even resort­ed to watch­ing films.

These are the cir­cum­stances in which many of said sad crea­tures got to expe­ri­ence first-hand, in a much more vivid and direct way than ever before, the very real dearth of women-direct­ed films direct­ly avail­able to stream in the UK. As the coun­try finds itself in a third lock­down with no clear end in sight, a new plat­form launch­ing in Feb­ru­ary promis­es access not only to a range of clas­sic yet lit­tle-seen films by women, but to the cin­e­ma of a whole expan­sive region.

“The Sovi­et tra­di­tion of cin­e­ma is the one tra­di­tion in the world that real­ly spon­sored female film­mak­ing,” says Jus­tine Wad­dell, founder of Klas­si­ki. ​“Right from the begin­ning, in the late 1920s and ear­ly 1930s, Esfir Shub made a cou­ple of absolute­ly won­der­ful doc­u­men­taries. From her onwards, there have been female Sovi­et film­mak­ers, and one of the things that we have real­ly focused on in terms of the choice of films was to sup­port and give vis­i­bil­i­ty to amaz­ing female film­mak­ers from that tradition.”

When the pan­dem­ic hit, Wad­dell was about to launch a big sea­son of war films to mark the 75^th anniver­sary of World War Two through her foun­da­tion Kino Klas­si­ka. After mov­ing events online, she was tak­en aback by the enthu­si­as­tic response from view­ers, and launched a week­ly film club show­ing either a clas­sic from Rus­sia, the Cau­ca­sus and Cen­tral Asia, or a con­tem­po­rary film that may not have been screened before in the UK. The plat­form was then born out of those suc­cess­ful events.

“I think that one of the out­stand­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of the films from this part of the world is that it’s a very dif­fer­ent tra­di­tion of film­mak­ing from Amer­i­can and Euro­pean film­mak­ing,” Wad­del adds. ​“Peo­ple real­ly respond to the nov­el­ty, the unfa­mil­iar­i­ty, the adven­ture of the films that we’re showing.”

Indeed, it is hard not to be excit­ed about Tatyana Lioznova’s Sev­en­teen Moments of Spring after hear­ing it described as ​“the Russ­ian equiv­a­lent of all of James Bond rolled up with all of John le Car­ré in one out­stand­ing tele­vi­sion series”. Tough Kids and Wood­peck­ers Don’t Get Headaches, direct­ed by Kyr­gyz film­mak­er Dinara Asano­va, are social real­ist films about teenagers and the clash of gen­er­a­tions in the 1970s and ear­ly ​’80s, which Wad­dell says are ​“almost Andrea Arnold-like.”

Far from the dusty image of a male-focused can­non, the Clas­sics sec­tion of the plat­form will thus reflect the diver­si­ty of a cin­e­ma tra­di­tion that not only includ­ed women from the start, but was famous­ly extreme­ly influ­en­tial at the dawn of the sev­enth art: ​“The films we’ve picked use a vocab­u­lary that stretch­es right back to Sergei Eisen­stein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Dzi­ga Ver­tov and Alexan­der Dovzhenko,” Wad­dell explains. ​“This tra­di­tion real­ly push­es the idea of film as art rather than enter­tain­ment – although some of the films on our plat­form are tru­ly enter­tain­ing. I mean, they’re just gor­geous and charm­ing and funny.”

The prospect of dis­cov­er­ing the cin­e­ma of a whole region at once can be daunt­ing, which is why Klas­si­ki will fea­ture plen­ty of writ­ing and extras to help con­tex­tu­alise the films and a ​‘More to Explore’ sec­tion will offer view­ers an easy way to find out more about the tal­ent involved. For exam­ple, the plat­form will fea­ture works by Yuri Norstein, who has giv­en many inter­views over the years about the process of ani­ma­tion – nat­u­ral­ly, all in Russian.

Wad­dell and her team have gone and sub­ti­tled them in Eng­lish, offer­ing an invalu­able resource to any­one look­ing to find out more about the work of one of the great­est ani­ma­tion direc­tors in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. ​“One of his most famous films is Hedge­hog in the Fog, which is 10 min­utes long, but we prob­a­bly have a good two or three hours of video mate­r­i­al on the plat­form that can con­tex­tu­alise that.”

But Russ­ian cin­e­ma is far from dead, and Klas­si­ki will also fea­ture con­tem­po­rary titles. ​“Pick of the Week” will make one recent title that may have won awards at major fes­ti­vals but didn’t find UK dis­tri­b­u­tion avail­able to stream for sev­en days. ​“The idea is real­ly to spot­light and to intro­duce impor­tant and excit­ing young film voic­es to our audi­ence,” says Wad­dell, who adds that we can expect films from Sergei Dvort­sevoy, Anna Melikyan, Alexan­der Lun­gin and Vale­ria Gai Ger­mani­ka to pop up on the plat­form in the first few months.

“We live in a world now where con­tent is real­ly easy to access, and it gets homogenised because there’s so much of it,” Wad­dell says. If, a few weeks into the third lock­down, no one finds com­fort in bak­ing banana bread any­more, then it might also be time for nos­tal­gia-dri­ven view­ing sug­ges­tions and end­less­ly rewatch­able clas­sics to make way for an excit­ing cin­e­ma that large­ly remains to be discovered.

Klas­si­ki will be free to stream for the first two months. After that, a core col­lec­tion of 30 titles will remain per­ma­nent­ly free on the plat­form. Those who become sub­scribers dur­ing those first two months will be Found­ing Mem­bers, and will always have 50 per cent off their membership.

Klas­si­ki launch­es in the UK on 4 Feb­ru­ary. For more info vis­it klassiki.online