Ukrainian Cinema Day

On 12 September, Ukraine celebrates Ukrainian Cinema Day. This professional holiday for members of the film industry was established by a presidential decree dated 12 January 1996 and is observed annually on the second Saturday of September. Its autumn date is associated with the traditional beginning of a new cultural season and with the birthday of the outstanding Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, born on 10 September 1894.

Interestingly, one year before Dovzhenko’s birth—and before the Lumière brothers held their first public film screening—an apparatus for recording and projecting moving images had already been created in Ukraine. In the summer of 1893, Yosyp Tymchenko, a mechanic at Odesa University, developed an intermittent movement mechanism. Together with physicist Mykola Liubymov, he used it to construct a kinetoscope. Some of the earliest short sequences were filmed at the Odesa Hippodrome and moving images were later demonstrated to the public. However, the invention was not patented, and it was therefore the Lumière brothers whose names became established in the international history of cinema.

Oleksandr Dovzhenko became a founder of the poetic vision in Ukrainian cinema. In his 1930 film Earth, he transformed the natural world into a character in its own right: nature exists in harmony with humanity, breathing and feeling alongside the protagonists. Dovzhenko used monumental close-ups of faces and landscapes and filmed a scene featuring nudity that was exceptionally bold for its time. Shortly after its premiere, the film was subjected to Soviet censorship and withdrawn from wide distribution. Only decades later could audiences see it again in a restored version.

In 1965, the masterpiece Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was released. It was an adaptation of the 1911 novella of the same name by the Ukrainian literary classic Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Sergei Parajanov, an ethnic Armenian born in Tbilisi, became deeply fascinated by the unique Carpathian region of Hutsulshchyna.

For centuries, this mountainous region in western Ukraine preserved its authentic rituals, ancient beliefs and mystical worldview, intertwined with Christian traditions. Parajanov immersed himself completely in this world and said: “Ukraine is my homeland, my second homeland. It was there that I created my first masterpiece; it was there that I became a genius.”

Today, Ukrainian cinema records the events of the war that Russia began against Ukraine in 2014 and expanded into a full-scale invasion in 2022. Filmmakers document the Ukrainian people’s struggle, events on the front line and the lives of civilians.

In 2024, Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. It became the first Oscar awarded to a Ukrainian film. The documentary revealed to the world the truth about the tragedy of Mariupol, the courage of its residents and the crimes committed by the russian army.

Soon, the Embassy of Ukraine in Japan, with the support of Ukraine House Japan, will hold the Ukrainian Film Festival. Japanese audiences will have an opportunity to discover contemporary films about Ukraine’s struggle, culture and freedom.