Best Ukrainian history movies

In 1933, Welsh journalist Gareth Jones travels to Ukraine, where he experiences the horrors of a famine. Everywhere he goes he meets henchmen of the Soviet secret service who are determined to prevent news about the catastrophe from getting out. Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture has resulted in misery and ruin—the policy is tantamount to mass murder.

A solar eclipse activates a magic time portal, and a regular schoolboy Vit'ko from the 21st century goes a thousand years back in time. It doesn’t take Vitya long to recognize the legendary bogatyrs in young Oleshko, powerful Ilya and severe Dobrynya. Their life passes in fighting cumans who try to destroy Rusichi at any cost, using both weapons and black magic. Vitya finds himself in the very midst of incredible events, battles with mythical creatures and acquires real courage.

In the early eighteenth century, foreign rule means dark times for the Hutsuls of the Carpathians. The two Dovbush brothers become opryshkos - mountain outlaws. But the two brothers become enemies - one cares only about money, the other - Oleksa - fights for his people. The Carpathians are convulsed with a wave of uprisings. The aristocracy uses its military might to try to kill Dovbush and destroy his legend. But Dovbush outwits them. The desperate lords devise a devious plan and attack the invincible outlaw's Achilles heel - his love for his childhood sweetheart, Marichka. Who will be the assassin to attack the Opryshko whose immense strength and bravery inspired folk tales? Will the lords' treacherous plan destroy the hero before he can lead his people to freedom?

As his country is gripped by revolution and war, a Ukrainian victim of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster discovers a dark secret and must decide whether to risk his life and play his part in the revolution by revealing it.

American boy Peter and blind minstrel Ivan are thrown together by fate amidst the turbulent mid-30s Soviet Ukraine.

The protagonist Andrii Dovzhenko finds out a horrible truth, that has been hidden in USSR for years - most of those accused of «anti-Soviet propaganda» were never sent to prison, but to special psychiatric hospitals with a diagnosis of "slow progressive schizophrenia". Andrii finds himself in a real hell of punitive psychiatry and faces a difficult choice - to cooperate with the KGB and return to his family, or to reveal the truth about dissidents tortured in such psychiatric hospitals. The script was based on the memoirs of Soviet dissidents who faced the brutality of a totalitarian system that used so-called "punitive psychiatry" as a weapon against free thought.

1918 Ukraine. Patriotic students, protagonists of the film, get ready to defend Kyiv and fight heroically in the Battle of Kruty. On this historical background reveals the story of the Savytskyi family - the general of Ukraine's counterintelligence and his two sons, Andrii and Oleksa.

Year 1947. Commander of UPA Danylo Chervonyi gets into the terrible slaughter of Stalin's camps, where he must go through hell and inhumane prison conditions, prosecution of criminal leaders, meanness, betrayal and despair. Danylo finds the strength to resist repression of the camp commander and makes a desperate attempt to break free, raising the first rebel in the camp.

This is a metaphorical story about the tragic and mysterious death of the most powerful poet of 1960s, human rights activist, hero of Ukraine Vasyl Stus and his struggle with the Soviet system. The events of the film unfold during the last attempt by the KGB to seduce the poet with a whimsical "freedom".

The film tells about the tragic date in the history of the Crimean Tatar people — May 18, 1944 — Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars. The plot of the film — a pilot, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Amethan Sultan. In May, 1944, a year after liberation of Sevastopol Amethan goes on vacation to his native town Alupka. On May 18 his eyes witness begining of deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

The plot revolves around the controversial relationship between maid Stefania Chornenko and blueblood Adelia Anger against the backdrop of the provincial Austro-Hungary in 1900. Both Stefania’s parents and Adelia’s mother died during the fire. Adelia’s father adopted neighbors’ orphan. Girls grew up together to become as close as sisters, though Stefania served as the maid. This attachment develops into love-trap: on one hand full of mutual manipulation and jealousy, but equally based on сare and devotion. The illusion of balance is broken when Adelia marries sculptor Petro. Everything gets even more complicated when Joseph, the old love interest of Stefa, returns to town as the priest and married man. Illusions are destined to evaporate and reality comes into focus.

Ukraine 1922. The Russian empire has already broken up, but a new state has not yet been formed. Many tried to create and consolidate their independence during this period, and this is the story of one of such people. This is the story of the life and love of one person - Ivan, nicknamed Raven ...

Military people call such places "FRONTLINE", liquidators who worked at the Chernobyl nuclear station called it "ROOF COATING". It was the most contaminated, and therefore the most dangerous, place in the zone. The remains of the roof coating of the 4th reactor. The operation on decontaminating the roof lasted more than five months. We will tell about only two days. About the most important two days in the life of an explorer - dosimetrist Valeriy Starodumov. He participated in this operation until it was over. He himself came out to the roof and led people there. He himself planted the "victory banner" at the level of 75 meters, as the signal for the zone: the roof coating has been decontaminated! Now, 25 years later, Valeriy Starodumov comes back to the zone. Now Chernobyl is a tourist object. But not for him...

Artistic portrayal of the difficult personality of Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his dramatic life against the backdrop of National-liberation war in the mid-17th century and the Cossack state building. The main storyline shows Khmelnytsky not only as hetman and commander, but reveals his private life and his complicated relations with his beloved woman.

Nazi-occupied Crimea, 1944. A boy named Itzhak turns to Saide Arifova, a local Tatar Muslim woman, for help, explaining that he and a group of other Jewish orphans are hiding from the Nazis. Arifova faces a moral dilemma: should she try to help them or save herself by refusing? Despite the impending danger, she decides to protect the children by hiding them in plain sight, and disguising them as Tatars and adopting them into the local community.

The Secret Diary of Simon Petliura takes an unprecedented look at the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic, which declared an independent Ukraine in 1918, and the later assassination of the UNR's chairman, Symon Petliura in Paris in 1926, orchestrated by the Kremlin at the start of the Soviet occupation of Ukraine.

Ukraine - 1636. Someone has attacked a battalion of cossacks that were transporting the gold of the Polish king. A cossack - Maksym Osa - tries to find the missing gold, but soon becomes one of the main suspects.

Human history, which is against the will was drawn into historical conflicts.

Suffering from a fatal malady as a child the future great physicist, Nikola Tesla, promised his parents that he would recover under the sole condition...if they allowed him to become an engineer. And he kept his promise. Never ending yearning for knowledge, research practice, creative endeavor, discoveries that have unfixed all established notions - that's what was the characteristic of the great physicist. Nikola Tesla would always remain a scientist whose life was a sort of mystification rather than pure reality.

This fairy tale tells about famous Ukrainian warriors Cossacks, about Paradise and hell, Christmas and evil forces. The Devil makes an agreement with St. Peter. If he can capture the best Cossack warrior and hold him until Christmas night, he will be able to wipe all the Cossacks off the map. The script for the movie is based on Sashko Lirnyk's story "About an old Cossack, a Christmas devil, four horns and a Cossacks".

In the adaptation of a poem by Taras Shevchenko in the last third of XVIII a small fraction of 300 Cossacks who were enslaving their own people for Turkey and were executed by other Zaporizhian Sich Cossacks are reanimated as living dead at one cold night.

There is a ballad written by Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko called “That Catherine's hut is on the hill...". It is about a rescue of Catherine's lover, whom she saves by posing him as her brother. This story, as a parable, flies throughout Ukraine's history and reconstructs its dramatic and heroic episodes. Every challenge, including the Chernobyl accident, leaves Catherine without her home. But she is stubborn, as many generations of Ukrainians, in rebuilding her house out of pieces. The story is not only about Catherine's redemption, but also about Ukraine's survival throughout the centuries that is reflected in a folk tradition called Toloka.

Ukraine, 1919. The friendship of two boys, Anton and Jacob, one Christian, the other Jewish, manages to survive the prejudices and hatred that dominate the minds of adults in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.

1971, Odesa Film Studio. The KGB studio curator orders a re-edit of just finished movie about the events of Ukraine’s 1920s "civil war" of a young director in line with the Party’s view on the historical events. This re-editing work is entrusted to a young female editor, which consequently realizes she must protect the director’s vision and the safe-guard the truth about her country under Soviet occupation.

A short film about Holodomor. Based on a real life story. A woman is walking a long way from one village, where everyone has died of famine, to another, with no survivors left. She is hiding away from everyone, all she can think about is how to rescue her son from starvation. The only way to do it is to put the child on a train heading to some town.

One hundred soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, led by Michael Duda, fearlessly fighting against the Bolshevics and against the Nazis.

One day a friend will betray you, and the enemy at the crucial moment will save lives.

A tale of a mystical helping hand to a woman who lost her husband in a battlefield.

Story about Metropolitan of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Andrey Sheptytsky who opposed repressive totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler and chose the path of service to God and people.

It is the early 20th century. Tevye the Dairyman lives in a small village in Ukraine. He is poor and believes that his daughters have one chance to escape poverty – a successful marriage. Tevye accepts a profitable proposition from a matchmaker, but his beautiful daughters have a different plan.

Kim Kuzin was a very famous person in the USSR. He was born as the 4-billionth baby in 1974 and, from his very birth, he became the symbol of all the children of the USSR. In this fictional mockumentary, we will attempt to find Kim Kuzin today and to make a historical interview with him.

Few weeks of Taras Shevchenko in Kazakhstan exile, before his discharge out of army, when agents of the secret police were in hot pursuit of him.

The film about the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, based on the novel 'The Yellow Prince' by Vasyl Barka. The film is told through the lives of the Katrannyk family of six. It relies more on images than on words shot in black-and-white.

Mariupol. Pre-war life in a small Ukrainian town on the shore of the Azov Sea, with a good family life, quarrelsome neighbors, amateur opera, denunciations to the NKVD, and a dance floor in the city garden, the persecution of religion and, of course, with love.

This story is a journey through time, starting from the 1950s with the creation of the first computer by Ukrainian engineers, and continuing until the present day when the IT sector has become not only a powerful industry but also an important front in the war against Russia.

Mamay draws on traditional Ukranian and Tatar folktales for its Romeo and Juliet-like love story and parable about chivalry and the struggle for freedom. Hundreds of years ago, in the wild steppes of Crimea that form an uneasy border between East and West, Europe and Asia, nomad and farmer, the proud Cossack Mamay falls in love with the Tatar beauty Omai. The title, like the storyline, holds a variety of different meanings taken from different cultures. In Turkic languages, it means "no one," but it was also the name of a famous Mongol conqueror, the great grandson of Ghengis-Khan. In Persian legends, mamay literally means "the spirit of the steppes. "

The Black Council gives a vivid picture of the different levels of society in seventeenth-century Ukraine. The main theme is the need for people to be motivated by high ideals as they engage in the struggle of truth with injustice.

'A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa' unfolds during an interesting era in the history of Eastern Europe when Russia, under Peter the Great, and Sweden, under King Charles XII, struggled for power; Ukraine was the pawn in the middle. In 1709, Ivan Mazepa, Hetman of Ukraine, which was part of the Russian Empire, signed a pact with the Swedish king promising to support Sweden in its war against Russia provided that Ukraine was given its independence.

Son Kale Hacibey is a historical action film that tells the story of a battle between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Ukrainian Hetmanate Empire on the one hand, and the Russian Empire on the other hand. The forces are fighting to gain control of the Hacibey Castle, an impenetrable fortress located on the Black Sea coast in the heart of Ukrainian Hetmanate Empire. And just when the Russians thought they were winning the battle against Ukrainians and Turks, a mysterious hero - a brave Ukrainian cossack warrior Andriy - arrives in Istambul to deliver a secret message from from Ukrainian Hetmanate Empire's leadership. A message that can forever change the course of this battle.

Ukrainian film adaptation of the famous work by Nikolai Gogol.

The story about the fate of Andrii Chumak, who escapes from the train, which had to arrive him to Siberian concentration camps. He gets to the Ukrainian village where he is harboring. There he also meets his love.

Based on a novel by Ivan Bahryanyi. About the terrible years of repression in Ukraine in the 1930s.

As Carpathian legend has it, Oleksa Dovbush was a heroic outlaw with excellent fighting skills and a gift to predict the future. He was left an orphan as a small boy after a local lord murdered Oleksa's mother. After spending his childhood in exile in the mountains, he returned as a grown man to avenge his mother's death. Oleksa gathered followers to begin a crusade against the lord, but destiny made other plans for him.

An erotic comedy based on the works of Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Grazzini Lasca, Agnolo Firenzuola, which humorously describes the amorous adventures of Italians of the Renaissance. Young beautiful wife cleverly fooled his old foolish men, finding ingenious ways to meet lovers.

Film tells the story of one of the most difficult and tragic moments of the liberation war of Ukrainian people against the rule of Poland (1648 - 1657 years) - Battle of Zbarazh.

The series consists of ten films based on love and erotic works of Ukrainian literature from the middle of the 19th century to the present day. The films explore love as a multidimensional phenomenon. This is a kind of retrospective slice of the history of society, culture, and art. There are changes in the attitude towards a woman, mother, lover.

1227, the last night of dying Genghis Khan. With promises and threats tyrant tries to persuade captive Otrar physician Akerke, the widow of the scientist, who was killed by Mongol soldiers, to save his life. But patriotic woman does not want to deliver the oppressor of his people and severely exposes his bloody tyranny of power.

The film takes place in 1905. The main character is a lawyer Mykhalyuk, a social revolutionary, an intellectual. He is the bearer of destructive power aimed at loved ones. Peace of mind leaves everyone who falls under its influence. He tries to compensate for his spirituality with love adventures.

The film takes place in 1659 when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's son Yuri took power from Hetman Vyhovsky. Supporters of Bohdan Khmelnytsky are trying to help his daughter Olena to save her father's regalia - the symbol of Hetman's power and independence of Ukraine.

At the beginning of the XVII century, events take place preceding the liberation struggle led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. A young boy Pavlo Pokhylenko leaves his native Kaniv to join the Zaporizhian Sich (camp and cossack army) to fight for freedom and the Orthodox faith.

The story of war veteran Sviatoslav Yavir. He follows the secret train that transports to the Siberia Ukrainian women, including his wife and daughter, repressed by the totalitarian regime.

The film covers the period from 1947, when UPA troops broke with fights abroad, and to autumn of 1959, when in Munich KGB agent Bohdan Stashynskyi killed Stepan Bandera.

End of the 1930s. The times of Stalin's terror. Lieutenant Scherbakov got the order to shoot several "enemies of the people". Unexpectedly, a rural wedding found itself at the crime scene. Pursuant to the instruction, witnesses were also eliminated...