Sergei Parajanov Centennial at the Anthology Film Archives

November 8 – Sunday, November 17

This fall, on the occasion of the centennial of his birth, Anthology is honored to host a retrospective – the most comprehensive ever presented in the U.S. – devoted to Sergei Parajanov. A filmmaker who was famously a man of three “motherlands,” Parajanov was born and raised in (then-Soviet) Georgia to ethnic Armenian parents, established his career in Ukraine, and lived towards the end of his life in Armenia (where he made perhaps his most renowned film, SAYAT NOVA).

Parajanov is (rightly) celebrated for his last four feature films: SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1965), THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (1969), THE LEGEND OF SURAM FORTRESS (1985), and ASHIK KERIB (1988). But Parajanov began his filmmaking career a decade earlier: between 1954-65, he directed four features and several shorts in Ukraine, all of which have hardly been seen or written about in recent decades. That has all changed thanks to the efforts of the Dovzhenko Centre and Fixafilm, who have unearthed and made 4K scans of the films from this first, hitherto neglected period of Parajanov’s career.

“The films that preceded SHADOWS… present a very different but no less fascinating director. Not only does this program provide an opportunity to trace Parajanov’s creative evolution as a filmmaker, but it also reflects the diverse output of Ukraine’s largest studio in the immediate post-Stalin era. It was here, over the course of ten years, that artistic stipulations would give way to the emergence of an informal school of filmmakers…who looked back to Ukrainian cinema of the 1920s, while exemplifying a defiantly poetic, even national sensibility, which influenced the cinemas of non-Russian Soviet republics and beyond.” –Daniel Bird & Olena Honcharuk

The Sergei Parajanov Centennial is made possible with the support of RIBBON, a platform supporting historic and contemporary Ukrainian arts and culture. The Parajanov Centennial brings together Kyiv’s Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre (Dovzhenko Center) together with Anthology in an effort to foster a cross-archival dialog. The Dovzhenko center is the largest Ukrainian film archive, with an extensive collection that includes 7,000 feature films, documentaries, Ukrainian and foreign animated films and thousands of archival records from the history of Ukrainian cinema.

Special thanks to Olena Honcharuk (Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre); Chloe Hodge; Anna LaBellarte; Sam Lewitt; Brian Belovarac (Janus Films); Daniel Bird; Cecilia Cenciarelli (Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna); Łukasz Ceranka (Fixafilm); Naira Gevorgyan (Cinema Foundation of Armenia); Susan Oxtoby & Jon Y Shibata (Pacific Film Archive); Nino Ungiadze (Georgian Film); Anri Vartanov (Metrograph); and Martiros M. Vartanov (Parajanov-Vartanov Institute).