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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Top 10 VUFKU films

More than 60 films (54%) out of over 110 full-length feature films are now considered lost.

None of Les Kurbas‘ films made it to us. Only twenty shots of Ivan Kavaleridze’s notable film Downpour (1929) survived. Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s first film Vasia the Reformer (1926) was not saved either. Once popular films The Blue Package (1926), Mytia (1927), Sold Appetite (1928), The Crowning Performance of Clown Georges (1929), The Big Grief of a Little Woman (1929), as well as the first Ukrainian cartoon A Tale of Little Straw Bull (1927) were lost forever.

Films of the 1920s were stored on the nitrate film and often set on fire, but no one at that time thought about their archive and historical value. Although Oleksandr Dovzhenko and Leonid Mohylevskyi made an attempt to create VUFKU cinematique in the late 1920s, further historical events prevented them from implementing this idea.

In the 1930s, Stalin’s censorship destroyed a lot of forbidden and unfinished films, and even those VUFKU films, which survived, were moved to a storage near Moscow (Belye Stolby).

At the Lost cinema you will see the real VUFKU blockbusters. However, if you see them in full will depend on the number of viewers in the hall. The more people, the more complete scenes there will be. As long as there are people who remember the lost stories, biographies and films, the past will live, saved from oblivion.

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