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VUFKU

All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration
Всеукраинское фотокиноуправление, ВУФКУ

Animator.ru profile: Ru, En

About:
VUFKU 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 the reputation of a "Ukrainian Hollywood", and take under its control all aspects of the cinematic process – film-making, distribution, film press, propaganda, and education.

In 1926, VUFKU founded the Central Animation Workshop headed by innovative animators Vyacheslav Levandovskiy and Volodymyr Devyatnin, who created the first Ukrainian cartoons, "Ukrainization" and "The Tale of the Straw Bull" (1927).

These first works have not been preserved, but what did miraculously survive were various campaigning and advertising "animated posters" on the current topics of disarmament, socialist construction, bureaucracy, etc., created at the VUFKU Film School in 1927-1930. In recent years, these have been attributed and restored by the Dovzhenko Center. Some of them have been uploaded to Youtube, mostly with more modern soundtracks.

The modern official government website dedicated to VUFKU can be found here. It collects a database of the saved VUFKU films, ranging from the most important (Earth and Man With a Movie Camera) to the recently found Taras Triasylo and Man and a Monkey).

On animator.ru, there are several different studio profiles, some of them for VUFKU in different cities (1, 2, 3, 4) - however, the filmography there seems to be very incomplete.

Films: