A short film which shows the making of a sculpture paying tribute to Kyiv’s camera-making past has been produced.
As previously reported on Kosmo Foto, the sculpture was unveiled on the site of the old Arsenal plant last year. Arsenal was the factory who live produced Kiev-brand cameras from the 1940s to the 1990s.
The sculpture marked the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Arsenal plant.
Called ‘City of Masters’, the film – directed by Valentyn Zharovskyi and with music from Antoniy Barishevsky – shows the construction and unveiling of the memorial interspersed with archive material from Soviet times. The film will be entered into various short film festivals over the coming months.
Producer Ivan Zotikov was behind the sculpture, which was unveiled to mark 75 years since the first Kiev-brand rangefinder cameras were made. Kiev-branded Contax copy rangefinders were made in Kyiv after the original machinery from the Zeiss Ikon factory in Jena was moved to the USSR after World War II as reparations.
The memorial was unveiled on World Photography Day (19 August) last year and was unveiled on the site of Workshop 10, where many of Kiev-branded cameras were designed and built.
Zotikov said the sculpture includes four of the cameras produced by Arsenal since the 1940s: an FKD large-format camera, a Kiev-4 rangefinder, a FED-Arsenal Leica-copy rangefinder and a Salyut medium format camera.
Zotikov wrote last year that he turned to a jewellery firm in Kyiv called Labortas to turn the memorial into reality. “From the start of the idea and all the way to implementation, the entire process took 4.5 months, which is very fast for such a large-scale task.”
You can watch the trailer below:
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
