VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration) existed for less than nine years (1922-1930), but it managed to release over 140 fiction films, several hundreds of non-fiction films and newsreels, dozens of animations, gain fame of “Ukrainian Hollywood,” and take under its control all aspects of the cinematic process – filmmaking, distribution, film press, propaganda, and education. From over 140 full-length fiction films made by VUFKU, about 60 films are considered lost. A lot of the surviving films have come down to us incomplete (without one or more parts).

The website VUFKU. Lost&Found is the first online collection of Dovzhenko-Centre’s media library and is perhaps the only online resource providing comprehensive information on VUFKU.

The mission of the VUFKU. Lost&Found project is to search and return to Ukraine the lost films of the 1920s. Traces of some of the lost films of that time can be found in international archives. Meanwhile, we are collecting archive materials about the lost films, restoring their contents, learning the context of their release.

These searches and analysis, restoration of films and their return to the cultural circulation require financial support. Donating to our fundraising campaign, which will start in October 2019, you will be able to contribute to the restoration of Ukrainian cinema.

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Streams

Stream / Flux / Breath of a New Life / The Tractor Will Plow our Lives and Minds

1923, First Film Studio VUFKU (Odesa), 5-6 parts / 1,180-1,696 m

Director:
 Mykola Saltykov
Scriptwriter:
 Oleksandr Rubinstein
Cameraman:
 Heorhii Drobin
Cast:
 Mykola Saltykov (Saranchev), Daria Zerkalova (Hania), Iona Talanov (Pilin, a Red Army commander), Bela Biletska (Motria), Ivan Horskii (father Feofilat), Leonid Khazanov (a Romanian spy)

The rich man’s son is about to marry the poor man’s daughter. But the girl’s heart belongs to a young tractor driver. One evening, feeling jealous the guy pushes the girl’s beloved into a fast and deep river, and then sets on fire the barn where the tractor is. But people manage to save the tractor, to extinguish the fire, and the tractor driver turns out to be a good swimmer.

Mykhailo Kapchynskyi, the first director of Odesa Film Studio, recalled, “It was the third film made at the studio after From Darkness to Light and Famine and the Fight Against It…

Rough-and-ready script on 10 to 12 pages became the basis of the film… I do not really remember but it seems that the script was written during one night by our comrade named Rubinstein. He wrote the script because he knew the situation and conditions in the countryside in those turbulent years… Saltykov and Drobin filmed it during nine days. Exactly nine days…

The director Saltykov himself played the long-bearded kulak with tangled hair with some flour on it. It was bright and talented…

The script’s name was long and boring The Tractor Will Plow our Lives and Minds. (That is what I remember). The last night, Saltykov was assembling the film, and at dawn Stream appeared…

In the evening on 8 October, in the biggest Odesa cinema Khudozhnii the film was demonstrated to the local party leaders and rich rural inhabitants from Biliavka, where the film was shot…

…a river in the evening. A beautiful Ukrainian landscape. The tractor driver and his girlfriend are standing on the shore. This picture and the sign The End were lost in the applause of seven hundred people…” (Mykhailo Kapchynskyi. Near the Black Sea. / Kino-kolo. 2003. Summer (18). – P. 84.)

The film was shot in September 1923. The film was released on 07 November 1923 in Kharkiv and on 20 December 1924 in Moscow. The film is lost