Browse 105 movies from VUFKU
A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.
May 1929
During the agrarian collectivization process in the Soviet Union, Vasyl, a peasant member of the youth division of the Communist Party, gets a tractor with the help of a local party organization and plows private boundaries on kulak fields. However, this enthusiasm will cost him dearly.
Apr 1930
The Soviet embassy in England sends two couriers with diplomatic mail to Leningrad. The inspector of security police, White, and a group of policemen attack the Soviet diplomatic couriers at night. The documents get to an English trackman, who gives them to his son, a sailor in Portsmouth.
Feb 1927
Jimmy Higgings is a worker of the plant making weapons for the Tsarist Russia and the German Empire. During World War I, Jimmy speaks at a spontaneous rally against the war. He is arrested. When released, he becomes unemployed. He is happy to hear the news about the revolution; he volunteers into the American expeditionary force thinking that having the weapons he can fight against Germans – the enemies of the Russian revolution. However, finding himself in Russia, Jimmy soon realises that the expeditionary force of American volunteers fights not against the Germans, but against the young Socialist Russia. Without any hesitations, he takes the path of revolutionary struggle, he spreads propaganda among the American soldiers and distributes Bolshevik leaflets. Captured by the American military police, Jimmy Higgings does not betray his friends. He is sentenced to twenty years in a military prison. Jimmy cannot stand it and loses his mind. Lost movie.
Oct 1928
To justify the fantastic adventures of the blacksmith Vakula, the authors of the film “simplify” Gogol’s plot: Vakula, having drunk too much at Patsiuk’s place, falls asleep. And he sees this dream where the devil takes him to the palace of Catherine II in Saint-Petersburg; and there Vakula takes off the little shoes of the Russian empress to give them to his fiancée Oksana. And, really, drunk Vakula takes off the shoes while sleeping… but from Patsiuk. Later, when Vakula unwraps the package with the “royal slippers” in front of Oksana, he finds only Patsiuk’s dirty shoes there.
Feb 1928
A Soviet film about construction workers.
Dec 1927
Jan 1929
After eating too much, the glutton-millionaire realizes that he has ruined his stomach. The hired scientist, Professor Fuchs, proposes a new surgical treatment that would separate the processes of satiety and digestion. To do this, you need to find a healthy person who agreed to provide the stomach. He is found, and soon the millionaire showed fantastic food absorption abilities. The painful sensations of an overloaded stomach were experienced not by the glutton, but by the unemployed driver, Emil. Lost movie.
Mar 1928
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. 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.
Jan 1926
A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists. The story of the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising at the Arsenal factory in Kyiv by the Central Council troops.
Feb 1929
It's 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.
Mar 1927
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.
Sep 1926
Exposing the customs of provincial philistinism in the years of NEP. Small town. Mitya, going to the party of his bride Shurochka, finds a dying woman with infants. When he comes to visit the child, everyone decides that he was the father - and kicks him out. Mitya decides to drown himself. Unknown saves him and helps to stage his own funeral. During the mourning ceremony, Mitya rise from the grave, thanks the inhabitants petrified by horror, and leaves the city forever. Lost movie.
Apr 1927
The old nunnery owns the best lands. Nuns rent out the land to local rich men, and exploiting peasants they have a wealthy life. The peasants live in misery. Especially, the family of the peasant named Levin. He is forced to give away his last horse, his son Andrii is imprisoned, his daughter Nastia becomes a maid of a rich landlord. Trying to prevent the master’s harassment, Nastia escapes and gets to the nunnery. She can see the other life of the nuns who manufacture false relics, drink alcohol and kill children. Nastia ends up in the basement for resisting one of the “spiritual pastors.” Meanwhile, her brother Andrii escapes from prison. He stirs up a rebellion and saves his sister. The film is lost.
Jan 1928
An animated propaganda film depicting the curiosities of Ukrainization in the 1920s in a satirical form. It was prepared in the animation workshop of VUFKU in the spring of 1927 under the leadership of Levandovsky as his third work using paper dolls after "The Tale of the Straw Bull" and "The Tale of the Squirrel-Housewife and the Mouse-Villain" and was not planned for wide release. The film is lost.
Jan 1927
During the NEP era, the ex-wife of a White officer, now married to a dedicated Soviet worker and lover to several bourgeois “specialists”, is expelled by her husband’s party for her affairs. Meanwhile, the commissar’s wife, once captured by White Cossacks, helps her husband lead a prisoner revolt and later serves as an exchange inspector on the commodity exchange. When she exposes the director’s fraud and her husband is wrongly implicated, both are reassigned to the provinces and depart together. Considered lost.
Feb 1930
Set in Odesa at the end of the Civil War when the town is occupied by the Whites. The night coachman, fifty-year-old Hordii Yaroshchuk, lives with his daughter Katia who gets involved with a Bolshevik and revolutionary.
Apr 1929
The film recreates the events of 1905. In the center of the picture is the struggle of the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik party, against tsarism. The demonstration of labor unrest is replaced by episodes of the Russo-Japanese war, Black-Hundred demonstrations, accompanied by a pogrom of Jews, and beating of the intelligentsia. The film paints the attitude of the Mensheviks towards armed insurrection, reproduces the picture of barricade battles, the arrest of the Council of Workers' Deputies and the brutal reprisals of the tsarist autocracy with revolutionaries.
Dec 1931
The violinist Leva Ratkovich loved the poor girl Rachel, but her father did not allow her to marry a "beggar". Making sure that in tsarist Russia he could not achieve recognition, Leva decided to emigrate. After wandering, he falls into the hands of an impressionario, who made him a celebrity. On tour, Leva met his Rachel, who was also forced to emigrate. The Wandering Stars finally meet.