The great break: Ukrainian cinema in the 1920–30s. From emancipation to Sovietisation with Ivan Kozlenko | Kino 2025

In the late 1920s, Ukrainian cinema reached its peak: due to well-thought-out policies of local culture elites, a peculiar school of Ukrainian film avant-garde, led by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, arose alongside highly popular commercial cinema. However, the triumph didn’t last long. In 1930, the local film production was placed under the control of Moscow authorities with the aim of turning film into a means of propaganda. This coincided with technical challenges: the emergence of sound dramatically changed the established avant-garde aesthetics.

Despite the pressure, Ukrainian filmmakers attempted to preserve the local film tradition, which was under attack from Moscow. In 1933, the autonomy of Ukrainian film production was restored for a short time. Under the guise of inventing a newly proclaimed official socialist realism style, Ukrainians created a specific version that blended the methods of avant-garde with local poetic and expressionist tradition. Destroyed shortly after 1936, it remains undeservedly forgotten in Ukraine and completely unknown elsewhere.

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Ivan Kozlenko is a film scholar, curator and culture manager, a former Director General of Ukraine’s national film archive, the Dovzhenko Centre. He is now pursuing his PhD in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge.

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