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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Viktor Turin

(1895-1945)

Viktor Turin

Viktor Turin (1895-1945) did not make that many films but he became known in the history of world cinema due to the reference film of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s Turksib. He left two more undervalued works Struggle of the Giants and The Provocator in the treasury of Ukrainian cinema.

In 1912, a native of Saint-Petersburg, son of an opposition lawyer and graduate of Realschule and a theatre school, 17-year-old Viktor Turin went to his family members in Boston. Next year, he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology (which is nowadays considered to be the best technical institute in the world). After receiving a degree in engineering, Turin went to the newly created Hollywood, where he either worked as a film extra and librettist or was involved in film directorship and worked for Vitagraph Studios, which was later bought by Warner Brothers.

In 1922, Turin returned to the USSR and settled in the south of Ukraine where under the umbrella of VUFKU Ukrainian cinema was rapidly developing.

In 1924, Turin’s name was associated with the idea of screening Lunacharsky’s play Arsonists which, directed by Boris Glagolin (a future VUFKU director), was staged by Ivan Franko Theatre in Kharkiv.

Turin’s first major film was Struggle of the Giants (1926) shot at Yalta Film Studio based on Solomon Lazurin’s film and script. The film impressed the audience, not least due to the work of the young German artist Robert Scharfenberg. Struggle of the Giants was screened in the Ukrainian SSR in March 1926, and soon the film was demonstrated in Vienna.

In May 1926, Turin began shooting a spy melodrama The Provocator, the only screened script of the Vaplite writer Oles Dosvitnii.

Turin’s further career was associated with the film trust Vostokkino, an organisation established in 1928 on the basis of Chuvashkino for the promotion of the Soviet ideology in the republics of Central Asia.

In 1920, Yalta Film Studio became part of the trust. At the new studio, Turin tried himself in a new genre of kulturfilm and shot a full-length film Turksib (1929) about the construction of the Turkestan–Siberian Railway and sovietisation of Central Asia.

Film critics actually canonised Turksib and proclaimed it a reference film of Soviet cinema. The film was successfully demonstrated in Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and London.