Voices from the Chorus (2026), with co-director and film scholar Ian Christie Screening and discussion exploring the life and work of Soviet filmmaker Leonid Trauberg

Join the departments of Film Studies and Russian for the screening and a discussion with the co-director of a new film exploring the extraordinary life and work of Soviet filmmaker and performer, Leonid Trauberg.

In 1941, Leonid Trauberg and Grigori Kozintsev were feted with first-class Stalin Prizes for their hugely popular Maxim trilogy. Eight years later, Trauberg was denounced as a “bourgeois cosmopolitan who had brought nothing but harm to Soviet cinema” and kicked out of the Leningrad studio he had helped create.

The new essay film, Voices from the Chorus (Ian Christie and Roland Denning, 2026) is the story of how Trauberg rose from the Jewish ghetto of Odesa to launch the Factory of the Eccentric Actor in revolutionary Petrograd with fellow-Ukrainian Kozintsev, how he and Sergei Eisenstein shared their love of cliffhanger serials and detective stories, and how they both survived Stalin's terror.

Co-director Ian Christie got to know Trauberg in the 1980s, having reunited his New Babylon with its original ironic Shostakovich score for screenings in London and New York, and was able to film him on a visit to London. Only later did he learn what Trauberg had suffered and how he had rebuilt his life and career after the trauma of 1949.

This essay film reveals the unlikely backstory of the Soviet avant-garde, inspired by Gogol certainly, but also by Hollywood slapstick and Griffith's melodramas, P.G. Wodehouse's bumbling aristocrats and Chesterton's Father Brown.

Voices from the Chorus had its premiere screening earlier this year at the Cinemathek in Brussels before going on to be shown as part of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna.

Following a screening of the film, Ian Christie (Birkbeck, University of London), will discuss the film with Lecturer in Film Studies Dr Paul Flaig and Lecturer in Russian in the School of Modern Languages Dr Jesse Gardiner, and answer questions from the audience.