Creativity Without Limits: Film Screenings by the "Kamenyar" People's Film Studio

Deaf people occupied a contradictory place in the ideological system of the Soviet Union’s socialist society—between integration and institutional isolation. From the moment the All-Union Society of the Deaf was established in 1926, a vast network of organizations took shape, providing employment, education, and cultural life while simultaneously defining a distinct social space for the deaf. This infrastructure not only restricted but also became an environment of autonomy: within its boundaries, distinct social ties, cultural practices, and modes of self-expression took shape.

From the mid-1960s, the "Kamenyar" amateur film studio operated at the Lviv House of Culture of the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf under the direction of Myroslav Maksymovych. Its amateur filmmakers not only documented the activities of the deaf community’s training and production enterprises in episodes of the film magazine "Our Life," but also created feature films, experimented with stop-motion animation, and filmed rehearsals, performances, and tours of the Lviv Theater of Mimicry and Gesture.

We invite you to a screening of films made by the "Kamenyar" film studio, during which we will observe various dimensions of community life, and how amateur theater and cinema became spaces where the deaf not only participated in cultural life but also shaped their own images, narratives, and experiences—reclaiming their agency and voice.

The collection of the "Kamenyar" People's Film Studio was digitized in 2024–2025 as part of the Urban Media Archive project of the Center for Urban History, Safeguarding Ukrainian Heritage of Amateur Films and Home Movies, implemented with the support of The Modern Endangered Archives Program.

The event will take place as part of the Center for Urban History's public program [unarchiving] in collaboration with the Lviv Urban Mobility Center.

Credits

Cover Image: Volodymyr Kurylas as Hamlet, still from the film "Rehearsal," 1975–1976, collection of the "Kamenyar" People's Film Studio / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History