Government officials do not need a chronicle of the state

It was a film town on three hectares of a park area with an arboretum, purple and rose gardens, separate buildings of the film processing shop, with its own well for an artesian water depth of 185 meters, a camera shop, its own power substation, boiler room, sound shop with the largest recording sound stage in Kyiv, that was aimed to record symphony orchestra, a separate film repository. And in 1947 the studio also had its own plane.

Production capacity was estimated at up to six hundred episodes of documentaries annually. Thousands of documentaries have been created based on it, including unique chronicles of the Great Patriotic War and the Chernobyl accident, Shevchenko’s “Chernobyl Chronicle of Difficult Weeks”, the only film in Ukraine included in the UNESCO International Register of Memory of the World. In addition to documentaries, the studio has created film chronicles about the lives of ordinary Ukrainians, their work, and life. Since 1940, all the iconic personalities and events of our country have been filmed by the studio and are now invaluable material for contemporaries. Since 1971, the studio has been a constant source of refill of the State Film-Photo-Audio-Archive of Ukraine named after G.S. Pshenichny, which stores all film materials that were shot by the studio throughout its existence. In Soviet times, filmstrips, which were also made in the studio, were widely used for educational, artistic, entertaining (children’s fairy tales and cartoons), lecture, and propaganda purposes. Unfortunately, in the last 10 years the state hasn’t documented anything ...

Since 2004, our country has been experiencing heavy historical events that continue to write the pages of Ukrainian history in the world and create a new Ukrainian community. The events that unfolded during the Revolution of Dignity, and later the war in the Donbas, had to be accompanied by chronic documentation by the country so that later the descendants would know their history, the history of their land. If there is no documentary evidence, the story can be represented as some people require to make a benefit for themselves.

Starting from the 1990s, the film studio began to decline, the state reduced and then stopped funding altogether, debts only increased, professionals were fired, and government orders did not cover the spending.

The destruction of the chronicler of the state was carried out in three stages: in the ’90s all state studies were transferred to self-financing; in 1999-2002, about 70 percent of the production facilities in the studio were confiscated and transferred to the Karpenko-Kary Kyiv National University of Theater, Film, and Television; a politician from “Svoboda” party Philip Ilyenko,(ex-Chairman of the State Cinema Agency), closed the program “Chronicle” ... But in this report, Mr. Ilyenko “forgot” to mention how he contributed to the destruction of the Ukrainian “Chronicle”).