The collection of the Lviv Regional Organisation of the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf (UTOH) contains photo albums and materials documenting the Society's history and activities from the mid-1940s through the early 2000s. The photo archive of the Lviv branch of the Society of the Deaf contains photo reports from cultural, recreational, and sports and health events.
A separate part of the collection consists of 121 films shot between 1955 and 2000 on 16- and 35-mm film by members of the film studio at the Lviv House of Culture of the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf — People's Film Studio "Kamenyar", which operated from the mid-1960s under the direction of Myroslav Maksymovych.
The films in the collection can be thematically divided into social-lifestyle and political categories. However, this division is rather arbitrary, since Soviet ideology did not recognise a separation between the private and the public spheres, and all aspects of citizens' lives were subordinated to a single goal—the achievement of communism. The USSR sought to integrate deaf people into Society through education, employment, and social support. However, they did not achieve true equality: the use of sign language was restricted even in specialised boarding schools; obtaining a profession was possible only from a limited list of industrial or technical specialities; and working at UTOH enterprises was the only employment option for most deaf people. Therefore, the episodes of the newsreel "Our Life" are devoted primarily to the activities of training and production enterprises in garment manufacturing, furniture production, glassmaking, metalworking, and instrument manufacturing.
The social and everyday scenes in the films depict the lives, leisure activities, travel, and recreation of deaf people, as well as celebrations, ceremonies, sporting events, and performances by amateur groups. At the same time, they highlight the social isolation of deaf people during the Soviet era, as all republic-wide amateur arts festivals or sports competitions took place exclusively within the community of UTOH organisations.
Films with political themes include scenes glorifying the feats of the Great Patriotic War, the heroes of socialist labour, and themes of friendship among nations. Part of the collection consists of biographical films about war and labour veterans. Some films are copies reproduced for distribution among UTOH organisations for ideological and educational purposes.
The studio's feature films, despite their high level of artistic mastery and poetic quality, are indoctrinated with communist ideology, presumably due to the cultural context and censorship of the time. They depict the struggle against oppressors—Polish landlords (Following in the footsteps of Lenin's "Iskra" (1970), "Five Days of Immortality" (1972)) or German invaders ("Years of Life" (1967))—and the fate of the oppressed, which improves with the arrival of Soviet power. The lead role in most of the films was played by Volodymyr Kurylas, an actor at the People's Theater and a painter at the Lviv Railcar Repair Plant. Several films in the collection are dedicated to the members of the People's Film Studio "Kamenyar" themselves and were shot on the studio's premises.
The studio's body of work includes an experimental film made using collage and animation techniques, as well as a comedic sketch in the detective genre.
Ukraine's independence significantly expanded the thematic scope of the studio's creative work. As a result, religious themes began to appear in its films (e.g., "Resurrection").
The collection includes footage from the following cities: Lviv, Odesa, Yalta, Žilina, Truskavets, Baku, Tashkent, Pidkamin, Samarkand, Slavske, Tbilisi, Kyiv, the Ukrainian Carpathians, Plovdiv, Stara Zagora, Brody, Kharkiv, Warsaw, Simferopol, Olesko, Kuopio, Drohobych, Stryi, Skole, Donetsk, Yenakiieve, and Pushcha-Vodytsia.
The films were submitted for digitisation by the Lviv Regional Center for Culture and Leisure of the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf (UTOG) as part of the project "Safeguarding Ukrainian Heritage of Amateur Films and Home Movies", implemented with the support of the Modern Endangered Archives Program.
