VUFKU

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.

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.

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

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.

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.

The film is dedicated to the achievements of the Ukrainian SSR for the eleventh anniversary of the October Revolution.

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".

The Government of the fictional country Norland has unleashed a war with the neighboring Galikania and is suffering one defeat after another. A group of conspirators who were dissatisfied with this state of affairs, led by the Social Democrat Frank Frey arrange a coup to overthrew the emperor of Norland. But the working class does not like the new order either. Workers expose Frank Frey's policy of continuing the war and a revolution breaks out in the country. The leader of the socialist revolution becomes a mechanic of the name Franz Stark.

In Spring is a masterpiece of the Ukrainian film avant-garde, a non-fiction film created by Mykhail Kaufman. In it, the now almost unknown Kyiv of 1929 appears. Shots of the awakening of the city, renewal of its life, echo with lyrical pictures of the revival of nature. Kaufman's attentive camera stops for a long time on the smiling faces of the children, painting a lyrical picture of a confession of love for Kyiv.

Heroic war adventures of an orphan shepherd boy, who saved two Red Army scout soldiers from the pursuit by White Army and as a reward was admitted into the squadron.

Set in Odesa at the end of the Civil War when the town is occupied by the Whites. The night coachman, fifty-year-old Hordiy Yaroshchuk, lives with his daughter Katya who gets involved with a Bolshevik and revolutionary.

During the Russian civil war, the Whites, that anti-Communist force that fought against the Bolsheviks during that period, capture a Jewish Ukranian village; the gang commander threatens a pogrom, and will kill everyone in the village unless the inhabitants agree to give to the White Officers five virgin girls in wedding dresses. Under such terrible pressure, the Jewish council of the town decides, full of sorrow and despair, to sacrifice their daughters to the drunken officers but fortunately and just in time, a detachment of partisans that belong to the Red Army, comes and frees the village.

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.

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.

The film is set in the 17th century, when social antagonism is at its peak. The poverty of peasants and poor Cossacks is opposed to the lavish lifestyle of the Ukrainian and Polish noblemen, priests, and Cossack officers. Cossacks fight off Tatars’ attacks, however, they start to realise that the real enemy is much closer. Taras Triasylo raises Cossacks to help the rebellious peasants. A dramatic historical narrative, masterly mass shootings of horse attacks, hand-to-hand combats and public festivities contrast with lounge scenes in the palace – balls, feasts, and entertainment of rich people and their family members wearing brocade clothes. On a grand scale and with an eye for detail, the director draws the texture of the film and its characters. The leading actors of Les Kurbas’s theatre Berezil played film protagonists. The film based on Volodymyr Sosiura’s verse novel of 1925 was considered lost for a long time.

The owner of the gladiator school buys two slaves, the Thracian Spartacus and the Gaul Artorix. During the first fight in the arena, Spartacus wins over the Colloseum audience and his freedom. When freed from gladiator slavery, Spartacus calls slaves and Rome plebs for a rebel. The dictator Sulla dies. Spartacus and rebellious slaves lay out a camp near Vesuvius. The Roman commander Crassus is unable to take Spartacus’s camp by storm, so he lays siege to it. Spartacus is betrayed; he dies with his friend Artorix in a battle. The film is based on Raffaello Giovagnoli’s novel of the same name.

Children from working class neighborhoods wearing patched-up clothes have fun in Kyiv streets - they slide down showy slopes, walk on the brink of a precipice and even conquer the light ice of the Dnieper river. They can see, how rich people live, only through a gap in the fence. The boy Fedko who is called "a tearaway" because of his naughty and disobedient character comes up with some risky entertainment, and adults often punish him for this while his friends do respect him.

The seamy Jewish underworld of Odesa is the setting for Isaac Babel's story based on the life of gangster king Mishka Yaponchik "Mike the Jap" Vinnitsky. Murder is a way of life for Benya and his gang until he finds himself ensnared in a Bolshevik trap.

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.