In the rubric “Selected by time and єю Film studio” Contact ” we mention the documentary filmmaker Viktor Shkurin (1932-2020).

Together with Alexander Frolov, they fruitfully collaborated with “Contact” and created more than one iconic project. Among the most famous of them, in particular, the documentary TV series “Red Renaissance” (2004), “Dissidents” and “Unforgiven. Skoropadsky, Petliura, Makhno ”(2007). Film director, yes, but in it other talents woke up. Born in Mariupol (then Zhdanov), he first graduated from the Odessa Navy, after which he worked as a dispatcher and PORT MANAGER (yes, this is the case when you can trust your eyes) on Svalbard (archipelago in the Arctic Ocean).

The chief was not yet thirty… Tall, stocky, there was something really captainly about him – from brawler-pirate bias (for some reason it always seemed so to me when I saw him). Maybe because already while studying in Moscow, at VGIK (he graduated in 1965) SHKURIN played a small role in George’s film Danelia (written by Gennady Shpalikov) “I’m walking around Moscow.”
The role was small – a pickpocket, who first manages to escape from the crime scene, and then all his are detained, thanks to the heroine Galina Polsky. Take a look – very funny and really funny Victor Skins. Because the director places the heroic-skipper figure of Shkurin in the frame of the lyrical-intellectual world metropolitan residents – and it’s funny first of all…
However, this impression is left – a free man, a pirate, so to speak, who does not fit into everyday life. event format.
He could continue his acting career, but no – the captain must be a captain, ie a director. Many years Victor Georgievich worked at the studio “UKRKINOKHRONIKA”, and in 1970-72. was even its director. Yes and in the Union of Cinematographers for many years was a member of its leadership, in particular, headed the control and audit commission, being one of the so-called union custodians of the foundations and traditions.
At the same time, the riotous beginning in Shkurin was always manifested. He immediately took up the material, which allowed to approach the peculiarities of human nature in difficult and sometimes extreme conditions. So this was evident in almost the first work, the film “TWO OF MARTEN”, where the production process is reproduced on maximum photographic expressiveness and truth of the characters. Or the famous tape “PARAS TROUBLE AND GOOD PEOPLE” (1967) with its penetration into the peculiarities of work and life of the then Ukrainian village – without the usual “Breathing” and ideologizing.
And so on – even in the “stagnant” years Shkurin published high-quality documentaries, based on study of man and his character (“Soviet character” – so called one of his paintings).
In 1980, the director decided to stage a feature film – “PLATO TO ME FRIENDS”, with Stepan Oleksenko and Kost Stepankov. Production drama, material close to Shkurin-documentary.
It is also not surprising that in the turbulent years of Perestroika and the formation of Ukrainian statehood, the director is back on advanced struggle for change in life. His (together with Anatoly Karas) dilogy “JUNE THUNDERSTORMS” (“Strike”) and “Emission”) in the early 1990s became a real event, it is a story about the actual uprising of miners in Donbass against the existing communist system, which seemed to glorify them in every possible way. The film was awarded the Shevchenko Prize and is virtually forgotten. Unfortunately, there was something to look at, see the image of impending catastrophes…

Sergey Trimbach (fragments of text)