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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Joseph Rona

(1878-?)

Joseph Rona was a German cameraman, who, like many other of his colleagues (e.g., Albert Kuhn), came to Ukraine invited by VUFKU in 1925 and worked there on contract until the early 1930s.

In Germany Rona shot a number of films, also as a director.

His début in Ukraine was the film Vasia the Reformer. First, Rona worked on it as a cameraman, and when the film director Favst Lopatynskyi was suspended, Rona took his position.

While shooting the film, he had a conflict with the young scriptwriter Oleksandr Dovzhenko, which cemented his reputation of a haughty and always grumbling person. It is known that he refused to share experience with anyone, and demanded “not an assistant, but rather an unskilled worker who would carry the tripod” (as recollected by the assistant director Oleksii Shvachko). However, it did not prevent Rona from becoming a cameraman of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s début film Love’s Berries, where he worked together with Danylo Demutskyi, a future cameraman of the legendary films Arsenal and Earth.

At VUFKU Joseph Rona also worked on films Boryslav is Laughing (1927), Sold Appetite (1928), and Zakhar Berkut (1929, unfinished).

In 1930, Rona filmed the documentary Man and a Monkey, which was considered lost for a long time, but was found at Tokyo Film Archive in 2017 and returned to Ukraine due to the Dovzhenko Centre’s efforts.