In the early hours of June 15, Russia attacked Kyiv again. Nearly every district of the city was hit — and the roof of the Assumption Cathedral caught fire at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the most important Orthodox religious sites in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A fire also broke out at the National Dovzhenko Film Studio, destroying Ukraine’s oldest collection of costumes. At Meduza’s request, film producer Alexander Rodnyansky wrote about the studio’s significance in the history of Ukrainian and Soviet cinema. For Rodnyansky, the attack is deeply personal: He was born in Kyiv and studied film directing at the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theater, Cinema, and Television University, whose buildings then stood on the grounds of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.
Alexander Rodnyansky
In the early hours of June 15, Russian missiles and drones struck Kyiv once again.
The strike hit the world-renowned Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, where the roof of its main cathedral — the Assumption Cathedral — caught fire.
The place where I studied for five years was less than a hundred meters from that cathedral. The film department of the Kyiv Theater Institute had occupied, from 1961 to 1997, one of the Lavra’s utility buildings — where, before the revolution, monks and novices once lived. Lectures were held in former monastic cells; the filming stage and screening room were built into former technical spaces. The windows of the dean’s office looked out onto a square, at the center of which stood the ruins of the Assumption Cathedral — mined and blown up by the NKVD in 1941 as Soviet forces retreated from Kyiv. Much later — in 2000 — the cathedral was rebuilt. Only for Russian troops to set it on fire now.
Missiles also struck Ukraine’s largest film studio, the Alexander Dovzhenko Film Studio. Let me tell you a little about it.
The studio is more than a vast production facility — it is one of the most important cultural symbols of 20th-century Ukraine. For Kyiv and Ukraine as a whole, its significance can be compared, say, to the role the legendary Cinecittà has played for Rome.
Founded in 1928, the Kyiv studio was the birthplace of most of the classic Ukrainian films of the Soviet era. Dovzhenko’s great Earth (1930), Mark Donskoy’s The Rainbow (1943) and The Unvanquished (1945), Ihor Savchenko’s Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1941), and Vladimir Braun’s Maksymka (1953) and Sailor Chizhik (1955) made the studio famous throughout the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s.
A decade later, in the 1960s and ‘70s, the studio became the center of one of the most vivid and distinctive movements in European cinema of the era — what came to be known as Ukrainian Poetic Cinema.
Its creators wanted to escape the conventions of Soviet realism, where plot, characters, and social conflict ruled. Instead, they focused on imagery and metaphor, national folklore and mythology, folk rituals, memory, and history. Their films were closer to poetry than to the novel — more like a poem, or a dream.
The best-known films of the period were Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), Yuri Ilyenko’s St. John’s Eve (1968), Leonid Osyka’s The Stone Cross (1968), and Boris Ivchenko’s The Lost Letter (1972).
Soviet cultural officials took a dim view of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema. It was incompatible with state cultural policy — too “national,” too Ukrainian, too obscure for mass audiences.
Censors mangled the films, shelved them, and kept them off screens for decades. Their directors faced bans and restrictions. “The Lost Letter,” for example, sat on the shelf for years. I remember how, at the institute, we were shown the film in secret, taking what precautions we could.
It also mattered that the makers of Poetic Cinema were connected to the broader Ukrainian cultural milieu of the “Sixtiers.” After the events of 1965 to 1972 — when arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals began — the authorities started viewing many cultural projects through the lens of political loyalty. And though the Poetic Cinema films themselves were rarely political in any direct sense, they were associated with a rising Ukrainian cultural consciousness. That was how the era of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema came to an end — a movement that many European critics rank alongside Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.
The Dovzhenko Film Studio produced not only Ukrainian national films but also some of the most popular hits in Soviet cinema. Consider Leonid Bykov’s Only “Old Men” Are Going into Battle (1973) and One-Two, Soldiers Were Going… (1977), Viktor Ivanov’s much-beloved Chasing Two Hares (1961), and the box-office champion Queen of the Gas Station (1962), directed by Aleksei Mishurin and Nikolai Litus.
The Dovzhenko Film Studio has long been part of the national heritage — not a religious or architectural one, like the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra or St. Sophia’s Cathedral, but a cultural one of equal significance for Ukrainians. And Russian missiles have now struck that studio.
The attack completely destroyed the costume workshop and Ukraine’s largest and oldest collection of costumes, blew out windows in administrative buildings, and damaged one of Europe’s largest sound stages.
For me personally, the blow fell on the very studio where my father — 39 years old — died suddenly of a heart attack in his office. Where my mother worked. Where I, too, once had an office.
So this is what Russia’s “denazification” and “demilitarization” look like.
Alexander Rodnyansky
Alexander Rodnyansky portrait photo: Sebastian Christoph Gollnow / dpa / Scanpix / LETA
