Directing
Viktor Heorhiiovych Shkuryn was a Soviet and Ukrainian documentary filmmaker. People's Artist of Ukraine (2002). He was a member of the Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine.
On a stopover in Moscow, a young writer Volodya makes friends with Kolya, who is returning home from a hard night shift. Just as Kolya is about to take a rest, he is met by his old friend Sasha, who wants help getting a deferral from military service so that he can get married.
The film is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roman Carmen. The authors tracked down his former students, whom he brought to the documentary. Almost half a century ago, they, then still children, first crossed the threshold of the VGIK when they passed the exams.
The second film of The July Storms duology starts with an accident at the Pochenkov Mine in February 1990, which caused the death of 13 miners. Since the summer protests, the real situation in the mines hardly changed; this lead to the second wave of miners' protests in 1990-91. This time, the miners' slogans include political demands, mentioning the decommunization of power and Ukraine's independence. The miners' representatives meet the communist officials, in particular with Stanislav Hubenko, the last First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Nikolay Ryzhkov, the head of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The miners meet the August coup and the final disintegration of the country of the Soviets in strike committees.
The July Storms is a dilogy about the first mass protests in Soviet Ukraine in a long time. The parts of the dilogy, Strike and Outburst, are dedicated to two waves of miners' strikes in Donetsk, in 1989 and 1990, which were unprecedented in scale. Several hundred thousand miners took part in these historical strikes. The events themselves became a significant factor in the history of the collapse of the Soviet communist system. While recording the unfolding of the strike and the miners' speeches on the square in Donetsk, the film's creators also observe the miners' miserable living conditions and hard working conditions at the Lidiyevka mine.
The film is about Ivan Honchar, an ardent collector of Ukrainian antiquities, who turned his Kyiv apartment into a unique museum.
