Ukraine’s Largest Film Archive, Dovzhenko Centre, Launches Online Cinema Featuring Unique Film Collections
The largest archive of Ukrainian feature films, the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre, has launched its own online cinema. The platform features films digitised by the Dovzhenko Centre's film laboratory. Until recently, they could only be viewed at festivals, special screenings and programmes. Now these unique Ukrainian films from different eras can be viewed online anywhere in the world by purchasing an affordable digital ticket. The cost of one screening is 45 to 85 hryvnias (1-2 euros).
The following collections are already available on the website: ‘Sergei Parajanov. Samples’, “TOP 100 Best Ukrainian Films”, “Ukrainian Comedy”, “Literary Film Canon”, “Documents of the Era”, “Ukrainian Poetic Cinema”. Here you can watch such films as Dzyga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, Oleksandr Dovzhenko's The Land, and Ivan Kavaleridze's Koliivshchyna.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the outstanding director Parajanov, the Dovzhenko Centre offers to watch a collection of his early works from the Ukrainian period.
The online platform also has a Lecture Series section, which will feature lectures, interviews, courses and archival materials on the history of Ukrainian cinema. Currently, you can watch six lectures recorded as part of the educational programme How to Stop Worrying and Love Ukrainian Cinema, which was awarded the Kinokolo Prize in 2023, for free.
The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre is the largest film archive in Ukraine, which houses more than 7,000 titles of feature, documentary, animated Ukrainian and foreign films and thousands of archival documents on the history of Ukrainian cinema.
The Dovzhenko Centre was founded in 1994 on the basis of the largest Ukrainian film copying factory in the USSR, which was founded in 1938. The Centre unites a film repository, the only film copying laboratory in Ukraine, the Museum of Cinema, a paper film archive, a media library and its own publishing house. The main mission of the Dovzhenko Centre is to preserve, promote, research and disseminate the national film heritage in Ukraine and abroad.