Arkadiy Malskiy

Freedom-loving Mykola Dzheria goes away from the village because of poverty and villainage. He leaves his senior parents, his young wife Nemydora and escapes to the sugar-mill. His friend dies because of slave work. Mykola goes to the Dniester reed beds. Working with other escapees, Mykola falls in love with the daughter of the cooperative leader. The girl also likes the handsome guy. However, their fate is decided by the landlord’s servants; they set the reed beds on fire, shackle Mykola and take him to Verbivka. The film was released on 01 April 1927 in Kyiv and on 24 May 1928 in Moscow. The film is lost.

The film is set in the 17th century, when social antagonism is at its peak. The poverty of peasants and poor Cossacks is opposed to the lavish lifestyle of the Ukrainian and Polish noblemen, priests, and Cossack officers. Cossacks fight off Tatars’ attacks, however, they start to realise that the real enemy is much closer. Taras Triasylo raises Cossacks to help the rebellious peasants. A dramatic historical narrative, masterly mass shootings of horse attacks, hand-to-hand combats and public festivities contrast with lounge scenes in the palace – balls, feasts, and entertainment of rich people and their family members wearing brocade clothes. On a grand scale and with an eye for detail, the director draws the texture of the film and its characters. The leading actors of Les Kurbas’s theatre Berezil played film protagonists. The film based on Volodymyr Sosiura’s verse novel of 1925 was considered lost for a long time.

Голод и борьба с ним

The first Ukrainian adventure detective story. The action takes place in Odesa in 1920, occupied by Denikin's troops. The White Guard counterintelligence conducts a fruitless search for the Bolshevik agent "7+2". The search is led by officer Enger. Dizzying races, disasters, and murders further confuse the agent's trail. It is only with the arrival of the Bolsheviks that the case is solved. Incompletely preserved

The film adaptation of Taras Shevchenko’s biography of 1925 is the first Ukrainian biopic. At that time, it was one of the most expensive films, as for the first time experts in history, ethnography, and literary studies were involved in pre-production. The famous Modernism artist, academician Vasyl Kryvhevskyi designed the film, and professor Serhii Yefremov served as a consultant.  Consisting of numerous short stories, the film that shows the life of Shevchenko as an adolescent, a soldier, a poet, was successfully demonstrated in Ukraine and abroad and became the most acknowledged cinema project of 1926. Amvrosii Buchma played Taras Shevchenko.

This revolutionary epic likens the push for industrialization of Soviet Ukraine with the battle for Perekop during the Civil War. A missing plow blade is presented as a symbol of the country's backward peasant economy that needs to be transformed in the course of the industrial construction. In an onslaught of rapidly changing images, Ukrainian village with its peasants suspicious of everything new, dramatically collides with the frenzy of working factories, plants, and mines.

Соль

A remote Ukrainian village. A poor peasant, Hryhorii Malynovskyi, wants to expose those who oppose the revolutionary changes in the village - the rich, led by Konstantin Popandopul, who have made their way into the village council and are ruling there. Since poor peasants enjoy certain privileges, the rich in the village council decide to exclude Grigory from the list of poor people. Outraged, Hryhorii goes to the city and writes a letter to the newspaper. Malynovskyi is murdered. The investigator uncovers the murder and the thieves are brought to justice. The film is based on the high-profile trial of the murder of the pro-Bolshevik rural journalist Hryhorii Malynovskyi in the village of Dymivka (later renamed Malynivka in honor of Malynovskyi in Odesa province, now Mykolaiv region), promoted by Pravda newspaper and mentioned by Stalin.