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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Arnold Kordium

(1890-1969)

Кордюм Арнольд

Arnold (Andrii) Kordium was a Ukrainian director, a master of adventure film, a native of Stanislav.

He left his home as a child and joined a travelling circus, where he actually changed his name from Andrii to a more melodious name Arnold.

In Katerynoslav he took part in the shootings of one of the first Ukrainian films Zaporizhzhia Sich (1911) directed by Danylo Sakhnenko. His stepfather Yalysei Shaplyk worked as a scenographer there.

He got through World War I, then he was in charge of an agit-train, later he served as a head of the propaganda department of Chernihiv district committee.

In 1924, Kordium became a Director on Ideology of VUFKU’s Yalta Film Studio, and the next year he was transferred to a similar position at VUFKU’s Odesa Film Studio. There he made his début as a director of a short film Behind the Forest (1926), where Oleksandr Dovzhenko also worked for the first time (as one of filmmakers).

Following that, Kordium was entrusted with shooting feature films Case No. 128 and The Invincibles (both filmed in 1927). The first one was dedicated to the pre-revolutionary fight of 1917, and the second one – to the fight of the Italian working class against the Falangists.

Later, Arnold Kordium shot such films as Dzhalma (1928, a story of a Chechen girl bullied by conservative residents of a Ukrainian village), Wind From the Rapids (1929, about the construction of Dniprohes on the Dnieper river), Mirabeau (1930, a narration of revolutionary events in Odesa in 1919), «Полум’я гір» (1931, a story of the Western Ukrainian loggers’ fight against the Polish tyranny), gaining the reputation of a master of adventure film who easily combined revolutionary topics with social and domestic ones.

Yet, after VUFKU reorganisation and subordination of the Ukrainian filmmaking to Moscow, Kordium actually lost the opportunity to work in fiction films.

In 1935-1940, he worked at Tashkent Film Studio Uzbekfilm, and later moved to Kyiv studios Ukrkinokhronika and Kyivnaukfilm, where he could shoot such films as «Колгоспні таланти» (1940), «Асканія-Нова» (1947), «В дружбі з наукою» (1948), «Соняшник» (1949), «Слюсарні операції» (1953) and «Паровоз» (1955).