The 'Revival' of Films in Society: How Old Ukrainian Film-Reel Movies Get Restored

The path to digitizing Ukraine's film heritage.

Ukrainian cinema is increasingly bringing old films back to theaters in restored form. This is made possible by converting film reels to digital format and fixing technical problems caused by the passage of time.

Many of these films were shot by directors who are now considered icons of contemporary Ukraine, back in the Soviet era. But because of censorship and repression, most of these films never saw the light of day.

So the goal of restoration isn't always to offer a fresh perspective on a film, but rather to revive it in the public consciousness and restore its place in collective memory. The DeTalks team looked at a few such cases.

How Film Restoration Works

First, a restoration center thoroughly assesses the film's condition. Sitting in an archive under poor conditions for a long time damages film reels: both mechanical and natural damage can appear — scratches, fading, stains.

The film is checked for signs of aging, such as brittleness and overall flexibility, which can later affect the digitization process. Flexibility is artificially restored to the reel, either through proper storage conditions or by treating it in chemical solutions.

One of the biggest challenges in working with old film is fungal infection, which degrades the material's quality or destroys it entirely. Special agents are used to eliminate the fungus, removing the buildup without damaging the film in the process.

Next, the film is checked for spliced sections that could interfere with the film-transport equipment. Where necessary, these are replaced with new splices, and to ensure the reel runs continuously, individual sections are also fused together. Once digitized, the footage can then be worked on without worrying about further damage to its physical condition.

Next, the film is fed into scanning equipment and digitized. This process uses software that corrects colors and paints over scratches identified during inspection. Restorers often use artificial intelligence to fix damage as well. Sound correction comes next.

For Soviet-era films, restorers often have to search for the original, 'director's cut' of the film, free of censorship and alterations.

After digitization, the original film is kept under proper archival conditions because of its durability. A digital copy is convenient for viewing and distribution, but there's a chance that such technologies could become outdated or suffer data loss due to corruption. Film, by contrast, is more stable and independent of technological change. That's exactly why even contemporary films, shot digitally, are often also preserved on film as the more stable format.

Additionally, documentation is compiled for every restored film, detailing its original condition, history, and storage conditions.

In Ukraine, film restoration is handled by the Dovzhenko Center. According to the institution itself, as of January 1, 2021, the Dovzhenko Center's film archive held 9,773 catalog entries — 60,283 storage units (more than 7,000 individual titles) of narrative, animated, documentary, and popular science films, mostly of Ukrainian production.

The Dovzhenko Film Lab has been working on film restoration since 2009, back when it was called the 'Digital Film Restoration Center.' At the time, the studio's film archive held around 1,000 reels, and only 30 were restored per year.

The studio later purchased a German scanner, worth a million euros, which handled the restoration work. The first restored film was Leonid Osyka's 1968 film 'The Stone Cross.'

Another problem was where most original Ukrainian film reels were being stored. In 1935, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ordered the creation of a central film archive in Moscow, to which every film's negatives — the original reels — had to be handed over. The institution is now called 'Gosfilmofond' and holds more than 600,000 reels of film, including Ukrainian ones. Among them, for instance, are the original negatives of Oleksandr Dovzhenko's work.

Examples of Restored Ukrainian Films

The Color of Pomegranates

In 2024, Ukrainian theaters released Sergei Parajanov's film 'The Color of Pomegranates.' The film was originally dated 1969, but a new, restored version was re-released to mark the director's 100th birthday. The restoration was handled by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, together with the Cineteca di Bologna film archive.

The original negative, Parajanov's own version, was found in Armenia, where it was first released in theaters. When the film opened in Soviet theaters, the director was imprisoned, so Russian filmmaker Sergei Yutkevich censored it and released his own version instead. Parajanov himself only saw this version after his release.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

'Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,' also by Sergei Parajanov, was last restored in 2012. This version was screened at film showings and festivals, including the Venice Film Festival in 2023. In Ukraine, the restored version was first shown in 2022, in Chernivtsi.

According to Oleksandr Teliuk, a research fellow at the Dovzhenko Center, the digitization work took several months, after which the material was transferred back onto film.

The Ukrainian Movement

In 2024, a screening also presented a restored version of the 1917 film 'The Ukrainian Movement' (original title: 'Ukrainskoe Dvizhenie'). The film is the only surviving footage depicting the leadership of the Central Council — Mykhailo Hrushevskyi and Volodymyr Vynnychenko — before the Soviet invasion. The restoration took three years of work, from 2016 to 2019, and in 2023, the footage was further refined using AI.

Filmmaker Ivan Kanivets has described how artificial intelligence makes it possible to process this kind of material much faster, noting that work that used to take 10-15 hours can now be done in 20-30 minutes, and that the quality of defect removal can also be significantly improved, adding that, on the other hand, the load on computing hardware increases many times over, and that they were only able to finish this work because they'd recently purchased a new computer workstation, said filmmaker Ivan Kanivets.

The kilok.art project has described how the film reel, held at the Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive, was copied for the Ukrainian archive more than half a century ago, noting that before that, the material had gone through dozens of rounds of copying, some of which involved re-filming directly off a screen — one of the most damaging methods for image quality, reads a piece from the kilok.art project.

Ukraine's film archive grows every year with new work from contemporary directors. It also continues to gain films by artists whose work went unshown during the era of censorship.