VUFKU

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Crimea. The middle of the 19th century. A proud and brave jigit Alim Aidamak who cannot put up with the workers’ abuse, works at the leather factory of the greedy Ali-bay. One day he responds in kind. He is fired, but he takes the memories of the beautiful daughter of his ex-master, Sara, with him. Young people went their separate ways. Alim takes the revolutionary path; he and his friends go to the mountains and start an underground struggle. Only his name is enough to terrify landlords, Mirzas and civil servants. Authorities send a Cossack detachment to catch the Crimean Tatar Robin Hood. The adventure film, which reminds an American western, was filmed based on a Crimean Tatar legend, which in 1925 was turned into a play by the repressed Crimean Tatar writer Ipchi Ümer. The shooting of the film under the script of the Ukrainian avant-garde poet Mykola Bazhan began in the autumn of 1925, when the indigenisation policy in the national republics caused demand on the national plots.