Ukraine's Film Industry Struggling to Survive

I think Ukraine's film industry has been given a boost by a Ukrainian court order that required the Ukrainian dubbing or subtitling of all films shown in Ukraine. This will give a boost to Ukrainian actors, or at least the Ukrainian voice actors.

The Russian film industry is nothing compared with Hollywood or Bollywood, but it's definitely ahead of the Ukrainian film industry. One of the reason is that the Russian government has made major cash infusions to produce politically correct propaganda movies about "Great Russian history". The other is that Russia's economy is ahead of Ukraine's, thanks to oil and sooner reforms. And the third reason is that the Ukrainian market is simply 3 times smaller.

Here's to hoping the Ukrainian film industry can survive and someday become something like the French film industry in France. And why not? Ukraine is a similar sized country and has a very attractive culture.

And it's beyond argument that Ukraine has very attractive people, both male and female! :)

Folk the movie

KinoRox Productions has made a documentary about the older generations of Ukrainian-Americans who have kept their culture alive for generations.

The movie is called "Folk". You can watch a trailer on their site:

http://www.kinorox.com/

Movies In Ukraine Now Shown In Ukrainian Language

Until this year, the film distributors in Ukraine, most of whom are either Russian or English-speaking, were being lazy and simply showed the movies that were prepared for the Russian market in Ukraine without changing anything. All the American movies were dubbed in Russian. A few years ago close to 100% of all the movies were in Russian. So, what wasn't happening through the market, happened by court decree. Since most theater goers are teenagers, in Ukraine just like in the States, and they are already educated in schools in Ukrainian, this does not present any major problems for the market. And according to public opinion surveys only 3% of Ukrainians were against the change.

Later in the year, the Ukrainian government chose to ease the requirements somewhat. Movies can be shown in a foreign language as long as they have Ukrainian subtitles.

By the way, Ukraine is now going through a huge boom in construction of movie theaters, because it is one of the few global movie markets that is still growing, and because there aren't nearly enough theaters in Ukraine to meet the demand. I remember reading about a Jessica Simpson flick a couple years ago that flopped in the American market, but was saved by the strong demand in Ukraine.

100% of movies are in Ukrainian

According to 5 Kanal, the Ukrainian government has taken the percentage of foreign movies shown in Ukraine in Ukrainian language in three years from 20% to 50% to 70% and now to 100%.

More here (video - 63,4 MB - in Ukrainian):
http://5.ua/img/forall/cytaty/chas_vajlyvo_chmil_carov_5kanal_18072008.wmv