"Sow and Produce"

In 1969, the Soviet authorities of Lviv and the numerous residents of the largest city in Western Ukraine celebrated the 30th anniversary of integrating the Western Ukrainian lands to Soviet Ukraine. To commemorate the event, different film production studios produced documentaries or newsreels.

One film stood out in this range. The film was entitled "Sow and Produce," to quote the line from the New Year song by Rostyslav Bratun and Anatoliy Kos-Anatolskyi. It was supposed to be an entertaining New Year’s musical engaging the trio of the Bayko sisters who were travelling to the mountains to visit a mother Magdalyna.

The same as Lviv jazz, the Bayko Trio were opening the 6th World Youth Festival taking place in Moscow in 1957. There, the sisters were awarded with the first prize (all in all, there used to be five sisters – Nina, Danyila, Zynoviya, Iryna, and Maria; but the trio band only included three of them). After ten years, this group of Lviv Public Philharmonics got famous all over Ukraine, while in 1968, the sisters had a successful tour over the cities in Canada.

The authors of the film decided to show the exemplary Soviet model of fancily dressed ladies popular all over the Soviet Union who are travelling from Lviv to the mountains on a state-of-the-art Soviet bus. They are the former villagers from the Lemky area, and now they are the proud representatives of urban Soviet Ukrainian culture. Now, they are going to the mountains for a good reason. They are going there to borrow some share of a ‘substance,’ of their rural and folk past. It was only this local folk substance manifested in rural songs that could provide for the success of Soviet song modernity in the West of Ukraine. The film screening will be preceded by the discussion. We shall be talking about why the 1960s modern Ukrainian singers ‘had to borrow’ their senses in the mountains.

About the film: the scriptwriter was the member of staff of the music editorial board of Lviv television station Myroslav Skochylias, directed by Roman Oleksiv, camera by Yehen Check, art director A. Pavliuk, film director T. Brykaylo. The film includes songs composed by A. Kos-Anatolskyi, M. Skoryk, B. Yanivskyi, O. Bilash, as performed by the Bayko sisters.

The film will be presented by Bohdan Shumylovych, researcher of the Center for Urban History, coordinator of the Urban Media Archive. The screening of the music film "Sow and Produce" will take place within the [un]archiving project of the Urban Media Archive, the Center for Urban History and the exhibition of "Lviv: UNION-icks" on display in the National Museum of Arts of Ukraine.

[un]Archiving is the project of informal presentations of sets and collections of the Urban Media Archive to promote and mainstream the problems of archival heritage in the community. We are committed to shape new attitudes on archiving and present historical collections in an unusual perspective. The events from the series include public viewing and listening to visual, audiovisual, or audio pieces that could use a different format from academic settings and create an atmosphere of free reflection and discussion, as well as combine popular formats and archival historical collections. It will be the nights of cine-music or photo-music, film screenings, photo presentations, and other events representing a dialogue of the present day and the past times.