The National Film Archive: 30 Years of the Dovzhenko Centre

Much of the film shot in Ukraine is held at the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre (Національний центр Олександра Довженка) in Kyiv, commonly known as the Dovzhenko Centre. The Centre describes itself as “Ukraine’s largest film archive” and the only Ukrainian institution that belongs to the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). It bears the name of the director Oleksandr Dovzhenko, but it is not a facility devoted only to his work. His film Earth is covered in a separate article.

1994: created by a decree marking his 100th birthday

The Centre was created by Presidential Decree No. 511/94 of September 10, 1994, “On Measures to Mark the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Oleksandr Dovzhenko.” The decree established the Dovzhenko National Prize and provided for “the creation of a National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre in the city of Kyiv, under the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine.” The same decree also declared that films and film materials produced by Ukrainian studios with state funding are state property and part of the national cultural heritage.

According to the Centre’s own account, it is built on the foundation of the Kyiv film-duplication plant (founded in 1938), which was the largest of its kind in Ukraine during the Soviet era. Its film-storage division, the Filmofond, began operating once vaults on the plant’s site on Vasylkivska Street in Kyiv became available for use in 1996.

What it holds

According to the Centre’s own figures, as of January 1, 2025 its film materials totaled about 62,400 storage units, and more than 7,000 titles. These are feature films, animation, documentaries, and science films, most of them made in Ukraine.

The vaults are divided into sections for original masters (picture and sound negatives), release prints, magnetic-tape sound, disinfected storage for mold-affected film, digital media, and more, with controlled temperature and humidity. The Centre says it re-inspects the condition of each film every three to five years. It also runs Ukraine’s only film-processing and duplication laboratory.

On September 12, 2019, a film museum opened inside the Centre. Its first exhibition, “ВУФКУ. Lost & Found,” was devoted to the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration (ВУФКУ, VUFKU), the Ukrainian film body of the 1920s.

Films recovered from foreign archives

The Centre has searched for and recovered Ukrainian silent films that survived in archives abroad. According to a March 2021 announcement, release prints of Kira Kiralina, made by VUFKU in 1927, were found at the German Federal Archives and Romania’s National Film Archive, and a 1,538-meter print was sent from Germany to Ukraine for scanning. The Centre says the film is one of 13 VUFKU productions sold to Western European countries, and that this is likely why it survived. Before this, it had also recovered Taras Triasylo (1926) and Man and Monkey (1928).

As an example of a restored film, Dovzhenko’s Earth was restored by the Centre in 2012 and released with a new musical score (see our article on Earth).

Funding shortfalls and the 2022 “reorganization” order

The Centre is a state enterprise, funded by state subsidies and income such as rent from its buildings. On May 28, 2020, it issued a statement saying it had “become insolvent.” According to the statement, this was because state funding scheduled from the start of 2020 had not arrived, leaving it unable to pay salaries for January and February, and because rental and event income — which made up 70% of its revenue — had been lost to COVID-19 quarantine measures.

On January 26, 2022, the Cabinet of Ministers, by Order No. 91-r, transferred oversight of the Centre from the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy to the State Film Agency (Держкіно, Derzhkino), and required the Agency to draw up a strategic plan for the Centre within three months.

That Agency, by Order No. 100 of August 5, 2022, decided to “reorganize” the Centre. According to the Agency’s statement of August 17, 2022, this consisted of two measures.

• Separating out the property of the state animation studio that had been merged into the Centre in 2019, and creating a new state enterprise, “Ukrainian Animation Studio”
• Transferring authority over storing the original masters of state-funded films to the Ukrainian Film Studies Centre, a state body established in 2011

The Agency explained that this was “reorganization, not liquidation,” giving as its reasons that the Centre was not legally an “archival institution” but merely held film in custody, and that it depended on state subsidies (7.606 million hryvnias in each of 2021 and 2022) and rental income. The Centre countered that the order amounted to liquidation in all but name, and would hand its film collection to a body that was not actually active.

The order’s suspension and how the court case ended

On November 15, 2022, the Agency announced it would suspend the order until an expert assessment of the collection, an audit of the Centre, and the selection of a new director were complete. The same announcement said it intended to begin procedures to give the Centre substantive “national” status, not just the name. The order was suspended by Order No. 170 of December 12, 2022, and Order No. 82 of June 28, 2023 declared both Order No. 100 and Order No. 170 no longer in effect. The Agency gave as its reasons that the deadlines set in the orders had passed, and that the establishment of a “National Film Fund” had been included in the government’s 2023 priority action plan.

The Centre had filed a lawsuit seeking to have the order annulled. According to the Agency’s announcement, the Kyiv Commercial Court ruled on July 11, 2023 that the order was unlawful, but the Northern Commercial Court of Appeal overturned that ruling on July 2, 2024, and the Cassation Commercial Court of the Supreme Court dismissed the Centre’s further appeal on November 19, 2024. By the time of the first-instance ruling, the order had already ceased to have effect.

On October 31, 2023, the Centre called for the withdrawal of a draft “Film Development Strategy to 2027” submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers, saying that the substance of the reorganization had been reintroduced under the name “optimization.”

National status in 2025

On September 12, 2025, Presidential Decree No. 677/2025 granted national (національний) status to the state enterprise “National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Centre.” The word “national” had already been part of its name, but this was when it was actually granted as a legal status.

On December 22, 2025, the State Film Agency announced that, to address funding problems the Centre faced in 2025, it would reallocate 2.5 million hryvnias from its budget to cover salaries and utility payments. According to the Ministry of Culture, Ihor Hladun was appointed director-general of the Centre in March 2026. Hladun had served as the Centre’s executive director since August 2022 and had been acting director since December 13, 2024. Culture Minister Tetiana Berezhna explained that the appointment was temporary and that a new director would be chosen through an open selection process.

In a Russian attack on June 15, 2026, the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv — a separate institution from the Centre — was damaged, and a costume collection of more than 100,000 items was lost. FIAF says the Centre’s own buildings were not damaged.