Wonderful news!

At the Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin, the Bundesarchiv presented Ukrainian films from the 1930s that were considered lost: Ipolit Lazarchuk's "The Swaggering Chicken" (1936) and Yevha Hryhorovych's "Congratulations with the transfer" (1932).

Ippolyt Lazarchuk is an iconic figure in Ukrainian animation: one of its leading directors in the 1930s, he would revive the Ukrainian animation school at the Kyivnaukfilm studio in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Based on a script by Serhiyevska and Katinov, "The Swaggering Chicken" was Lazarchuk's first independent work. In the story, an arrogant chick gets behind a fence and, after surviving a series of dangers and trials, returns home to enjoy life with his friends. The technical highlight was the use of slow motion voice recording, which gave the effect of a funny high-pitched voice to the character. And according to animator Iryna Hurvych, production designer Serhiy Kononchuk referred to the style of Heorhiy Narbut in the visuals, carefully (1930s!) adding “Ukrainianness” to the image.

“Congratulations with the transfer” by Yevga Grigorovich is a children's film about sixth-graders who, overcoming their “excessive” individualism and isolation from the team, happily re-educate themselves and move on to the next grade. The highlight of the film was an animated insert: the young hero's dream of a fully automated dairy farm where he would only need to “press buttons.” Yevha (real name Yevheniia) Hryhorovych was one of the few film directors of the 1930s. Her direction was mainly educational and upbringing (which included an important propaganda component at that time) cinema: the cultural film "To a Woman About a Woman" (1930), fortunately, has been preserved, the fiction films "Congratulations with the transfer", "Budyonishi" (1935), "Sunny Masquerade", and others.

The films were discovered as part of an important initiative of the Bundesarchiv: with the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the institution decided to support Ukraine and began to search for and digitize Ukrainian films. Today, most of our silent and early sound films are considered lost. However, and this is a global situation, there is always hope to find such a “lost film” in the archives of other countries - for example, not long ago, Petro Chardynin's "Taras Tryasylo" was found in the French archive, which was “hidden” under the distribution title "The Tatars".

Not only masterpieces made their way abroad, and not always for distribution purposes: the introductory credits to “Congratulations with the transfer” made by the archive state that the film was intended for limited viewing only. We can assume that such films were purchased and watched for the purpose of, so to speak, “checking the temperature in the ward.” That is, to analyze the situation in the USSR. This means that many more pleasant surprises may await us in foreign archives. In the meantime, according to Adelheid Heftberger, a representative of the Bundesarchiv, who presented the film together with Anna Onufrienko from the Dovzhenko Center, the recovered films by Yevha Hryhorovych and Ipolit Lazarchuk will soon be solemnly handed over to Ukraine.