It is celebrated annually in Ukraine Day of Ukrainian cinema. The holiday was initiated by the decree of the President of Ukraine dated January 12, 1996 and is scheduled for the second Saturday of September.

The history of Ukrainian cinema begins in 1893. Yosyp Timchenko, a mechanic at Odessa University, assembled the world’s first apparatus capable of shooting and playing movies (the famous invention of the Lumiere brothers appeared two years later). At that time, cinematography was called “moving photography”. The first movie screening in Ukraine took place on December 2, 1896 in the Kharkiv Opera House, the modern regional philharmonic hall. Several short films shot in Kharkiv by Alfred Fedetskyi, a Ukrainian photographer and the first operator of documentary films, were shown at the session. Since then, small film studios began to appear across Ukraine in the cities of Dnipro (then Katerynoslav), Kyiv and Odesa, which filmed the first vaudevilles, comedies and dramas.

The real breakthrough in cinema took place at the beginning of the 20th century. with the release of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s films “Zvenigora”, “Arsenal” and “Zemlya” (1928-1930). And in the 1930s, sound appeared for the first time in Ivan Kavaleridze’s tapes “Koliivshchyna”, “Prometheus” and “Natalka Poltavka” (1933-1936). In the post-war years, films by famous directors – Serhii Paradzhanov, Kira Muratova, Leonid Osyka – appeared. The stars Ivan Mykolaichuk, Leonid Bykov, Ada Rogovtseva and Bohdan Stupka shone in them.

• Today, Ukrainian cinema is gradually gaining momentum. Some of the films were nominated for an Oscar.