Still from "PKP," the Kino-Kolo Magazine.

The Oleksander Dovzhenko Center is to issue a set of six DVD with newly restored, digitally re-mastered and subtitled into English Ukrainian silent films made in the 1920s. This information was given to Yuri Shevchuk by the current director of the National Film Administration renamed into Derzhkino, Ms. Kateryna Kopylova. The release will be the fourth such gift set, the result of a larger-scale project, initiated some seven years ago and designed to restore and make available to the public in a DVD format the most important surviving Ukrainian films under the heading "Classics of Ukrainian Cinematography."

A few years ago a group of enthusiasts in Odesa headed by Ivan Kozlenko came up with an idea of a silent film festival "Mute Nights" (http://mutenightsfestival.com ) and having bands from that country and abroad create original sound tracks, play them during the public screenings of select silent films and thus give them a modern interpretation through music. The first such festival was a great success and made a buzz around early Ukrainian film that logically translated into the project about to yield its first fruit this coming fall. The six films are coupled by three genre clusters: 1) psychological drama "Two Days" by Heorhii Stabovy," 1927 and "The Night Coach" by Heorhii Tasin, 1928 and; 2) revolutionary epic, "Zvenyhora" by Oleksander Dovzhenko, 1927 and "Perekop" by Ivan Kavaleridze, 1930; 3) documentary, "A Man with a Movie Camera" by Dzyga Vertov, 1929 and "Spring" by Mikhail Kaufman, 1928. The set will also include rare film and photographic archival materials, a Ukrainian-English film catalogue with detailed information about the featured filmmakers and essays by leading Ukrainian film historians. Each film will have subtitles in seven languages (English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian). The Ukrainian language inter-titles will be restored to and inserted into all films as most of them were Russified at one point or another. The Ukrainian Film Club of CU is a partner of this exciting cultural undertaking. We helped to program the first Mute Nights Film Festival and created English subtitles in four films.

The release of the second and third parts of the silent film collection is slated for 2012 and will include, among others, films from Ukrainian, Russian, French, and German archives some of which have, up until very recently, been considered irretrievably lost: "Self-Seeker" (Shkurnyk) by Mykola Shpykovsky, 1928, "Ukrazia" in two parts by Petro Chardynin, 1925, "Karmeliuk" by Favst Lopatynsky, 1931,  "Taras Triasylo" by Petro Chardynin, 1926, "Mirabeau" by Arnold Kordium, 1929, "PKP" (Pilsudski Bought Petliura) by Heorhii Stabovy, 1926, "Fata Morgana" by Borys Tiahno, 1931, "Agent Provocateur" by Turin, 1927, "Taras Shevchenko" by Petro Chardynin, 1926, "The Symphony of Donbas," 1930 by Dzyga Vertov.

The DVD collection "Ukrainian Silent Film" will be released in two forms, as a gift for cultural and educational institutions and as a set for purchase through regular commercial networks.