Sonata about the artist

During the period of the 20-30s of the twentieth century, Ukrainian culture experienced its formation, flourishing and tragic finale. The three-part documentary tells about the shares of Vladimir Sosyura, Pavel Ticini, Nikolai Fitilev, Les Kurbas, Nikolai Kulish, Mikhail Boychuk and Alexander Dovzhenko. The film uses a chronicle of that time, the authors visited the places where the events of this dark era for Ukraine unfolded, and in numerous museums that have preserved materials, papers and evidence of those years.

On a stopover in Moscow, a young writer Volodya makes friends with Kolya, who is returning home from a hard night shift. Just as Kolya is about to take a rest, he is met by his old friend Sasha, who wants help getting a deferral from military service so that he can get married.

The second film of The July Storms duology starts with an accident at the Pochenkov Mine in February 1990, which caused the death of 13 miners. Since the summer protests, the real situation in the mines hardly changed; this lead to the second wave of miners' protests in 1990-91. This time, the miners' slogans include political demands, mentioning the decommunization of power and Ukraine's independence. The miners' representatives meet the communist officials, in particular with Stanislav Hubenko, the last First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and Nikolay Ryzhkov, the head of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The miners meet the August coup and the final disintegration of the country of the Soviets in strike committees.

The July Storms is a dilogy about the first mass protests in Soviet Ukraine in a long time. The parts of the dilogy, Strike and Outburst, are dedicated to two waves of miners' strikes in Donetsk, in 1989 and 1990, which were unprecedented in scale. Several hundred thousand miners took part in these historical strikes. The events themselves became a significant factor in the history of the collapse of the Soviet communist system. While recording the unfolding of the strike and the miners' speeches on the square in Donetsk, the film's creators also observe the miners' miserable living conditions and hard working conditions at the Lidiyevka mine.