PIGS ARE ALWAYS PIGS (PUPKY STATION), a silent comedy produced at the Ukrainfilm Odesa Film Studio in 1930 by director Khanan Shmain, was long considered lost. Last year, the Russian film scholar Piotr Bagrov discovered the film in the Bundesarchiv, German Federal Archives. The director of the Bundesarchiv contacted Mr. Ivan Kozlenko, the director on [sic] the Oleksander Dovzhenko National Film Archive in Kyiv in February 2015 with the offer to transfer the seven reels of film, both positive and negative prints, that were in their collection to Ukraine. It was arranged for the film to be sent by diplomatic post. PIGS arrived in Ukraine on August 22. […]

Breaking the news on his FB page, Ivan Kozlenko notes that “PIGS is an unbelievably witty, dynamic comedy that simultaneously makes fun of Soviet bureaucracy, formalism pushed to the limits of the absurd through utter mayhem and sabotage, anti-intellectualism, and provincialism far from the historical challenges of the age. […] Comedies are perhaps the worst preserved genre of the Ukrainian silent period: most trenchantly broadcasting all the flaws of the Soviet totalitarian system, they were the first to be banned and often never even made it to the screen. Today we know of just five surviving Ukrainian comedies. Beyond a shadow of doubt, PIGS is one of the best.”

Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University, December 6, 2016

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