Man with a Movie Camera 1929
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.
Vasyl, a member of the Komsomol, with the help of a local party organization, gets a tractor and plows private boundaries "on kulak fields". However, this enthusiasm will cost him dearly.
A lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbass who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the Five Year Plan.
The momentous film stars Mykola Nademskyi as the grandfather of Tymish (Semen Svashenko), whom he alerts to secret treasure buried in the mountains of Zvenygora – Treasure that rightfully belongs to his homeland. The film wonderfully blends both lyricism and politics and uses its central construct to build a montage praising Ukrainian industrialization, attacking the bourgeoisie, celebrating the beauty of the Ukrainian steppe and retelling ancient folklore. Said Sergei Eisenstein of the film, "As the lights went on, we felt that we had just witnessed a memorable event in the development of the cinema".
Ukrainian agitprop film from 1929 that was banned and long forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1970s, imaginatively shot by the gifted cameraman Oleksii Pankratiev, whose panoramic long shots feature dynamic compositions. The background, barren field and bare sky, raise the agricultural subject matter to the level of an epic poem. Using innovative editing, Shpykovskyi transformed an incredibly simple plot into an avant-garde work. Created the same year as Earth (Zemlya), the film forms a paradoxically conceptual, ideological, and aesthetic pair with Dovzhenko’s movie.
The heroine of the film leaves her husband, who does not allow her to study, takes her child with her and goes to medical school.
Set in an imaginary land where the threat of revolution spurs the Emperor to seek exile in one of the most distant parts of his realm. There he meets Elka, the daughter of a revolutionary who has been banished here due to his confrontational activities. The two fall in love but meet a violent end when the revolutionaries, led by Elka's father, destroy the palace.
Lost film directed by Oleksandr Dovzhenko (his first film) and Favst Lopatynskyi. It is a satire of the NEP period. Vasia, the son of a factory’s worker, is attracted by the romance of adventures. And he goes to look for them. He saves a drowning drunkard who tries to beat him. Vasia escapes from him in a vehicle parked on the shore. However, the vehicle belongs to a superintendent who, when he does not find it, stages its theft. Meanwhile, Vasia exposes priests in the church. As a result, the church is turned into a cinema, and the priest becomes a cinema technician. And finally, Vasia’s last deed is catching a criminal at home and denouncing him to the militia.
The film adaptation of Taras Shevchenko’s biography of 1925 is the first Ukrainian biopic. At that time, it was one of the most expensive films, as for the first time experts in history, ethnography, and literary studies were involved in pre-production. The famous Modernism artist, academician Vasyl Kryvhevskyi designed the film, and professor Serhii Yefremov served as a consultant. Consisting of numerous short stories, the film that shows the life of Shevchenko as an adolescent, a soldier, a poet, was successfully demonstrated in Ukraine and abroad and became the most acknowledged cinema project of 1926. Amvrosii Buchma played Taras Shevchenko.
Directed by Grigori Gritscher-Tscherikower.
The film is dedicated to the achievements of the Ukrainian SSR for the eleventh anniversary of the October Revolution.
The poor tailor Perchyk who dreams to buy a she-goat lives in a small town. Meanwhile, Perchyk’s daughter Frida falls in love with the unemployed Elia Perchyk is totally against their marriage, as he cannot buy a she-goat if the son-in-law does not have any money. Finally, Perchyk buys a she-goat from a rich tavern owner but he gives him… a goat. Moreover, a police officer dissatisfied with the tailored uniform forges a document, according to which Perchyk and his whole family are expelled from the town as troublemakers.
An opportunistic Kyivan Apollon Shmyguyev, whose peaceful bourgeois life is interrupted by the civil war, decides to wait out the trouble in the South of Ukraine, which is under the rule of the Russian White Army. After gathering left off goods on Andriyivskyi descent in Kyiv, he goes on a journey with a camel, which somehow had strayed to his house. In the midway he is stopped by the Red Army: the camel gets confiscated for the needs of revolution, and Apollon appears in the disposal of the Bolshevik commissar. Zealous and cunning, Apollon quickly takes lead of the local commissariat. But the ingrained thirst for a profit once again puts his life in danger.
The first years of industrialisation. Disguised as a hunter, an ex-White officer Poloz, who is connected to the international intelligence, is hiding in the forest where the construction of a new power station has begun. An intern making photos of the buildings suddenly notices Poloz. Frightened to be exposed, Poloz kills the guy and makes a cut in the base of the scaffolding of the main building of the power station. In face of a failure, counting on his ex-wife Katia’s help, Poloz kidnaps a 10-year-old boy. Hrai, an engineer and the father of the kidnapped boy, finds Poloz’s hiding place in the forest, and his assistant Varrava shoots the White officer at that very moment when he tries to explode the main building of the power station. The film is lost.
This revolutionary epic likens the push for industrialization of Soviet Ukraine with the battle for Perekop during the Civil War. A missing plow blade is presented as a symbol of the country's backward peasant economy that needs to be transformed in the course of the industrial construction. In an onslaught of rapidly changing images, Ukrainian village with its peasants suspicious of everything new, dramatically collides with the frenzy of working factories, plants, and mines.
Jean, the hairdresser, is flabbergasted: what is that baby his girlfriend Lisa has put in his arms out of the blue? The fruit of love? Out of the question. From that moment on, the reluctant father has but one thought in his head: he must get rid of the cumbersome 'article'. And, take his word for it, all the ways are good.
The defeated remnants of vile Ukrainian nationalists, headed by the leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement, Symon Petliura, cannot accept their historical fate and are plotting an insurrection against the Soviet regime in Ukraine. There is nothing Petliura and his cohorts would not do to win back control over Ukraine, including selling it to the highest bidder, in this case, the Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski. A group of plotters are coordinating an insurrection in Kyiv with an attack from Poland headed by Petliura’s general Yurko Tiutiunnyk. Predictably, the invincible Red Army defeats the nationalist plotters and proves that the Soviet borders are impregnable.