Sergei Parajanov

Documentary hommage to Sergey Parajanov on the occasion of his 100 anniversary. Witness the blend of unique archive material with surrealistic puppetry scenes, seamlessly blurring the lines between imagination and reality.

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Documentary about the life of Sergei Parajanov, a prominent Soviet-era filmmaker who was active in Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia and was persecuted by the communist government for his views on the pretext of his homosexuality, which was a crime in the USSR. The centerpiece of this documentary is Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a 1965 movie directed by Parajanov, that awakened the Ukrainian national consciousness which had been suppressed by decades of Soviet rule.

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"L'Artifice et le factice" is the episode that covers the period from January 1, 1988 to December 31, 1988 of my filmed Notebooks.

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Sergei Paradjanov, the great Soviet filmmaker of Armenian origin who was born and grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, studied film in Moscow and worked for many years in Ukraine, talks on camera to Fotos Lamprinos about his life, his films, and events in the USSR under Gorbachev’s Perestroika, a few short months before he died and while the state of his health was already deteriorating. The film includes rare footage of the massacre of Georgian civilians by the Soviet Army in April 1989 and unpublished material from the Ukrainian prison in which Paradjanov served his sentence.

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A short documentary by Levon Grigoryan about the making of Parajanov's «Sayat-Nova», or «The Colour of Pomegranates».

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Film devoted to director Sergei Parajanov. The film is designed as a confession of the director. There are pictures of various episodes of his life, while shooting, at his home, in prison... The commentary comes in the form of a monologue consisting of excerpts from letters, notes and scripts of his unfinished film The Confession.

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Roman Shyrman's documentary details the life and work of Sergei Paradjanov, who was no less vibrant and extravagant in everyday life than in his films. His personal life was itself a piece of art. This film is a tragicomic story about this great improviser and fantasist.

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This documentary is not a straightforward portrait of Armenian film director Sergei Paradjanov's life, but rather a fluid celebration of his talent and creativity. Focusing on the collages he produced during his years in prison, and featuring interviews with the director himself, Cazals' film demonstrates the scope of Paradjanov's artistic vision, lovingly commemorating this rebel of art cinema.

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The art, destiny, and relationship of two geniuses of world cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky and Sergei Parajanov.

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“Drawing on archival footage, fragments of interviews, and scenes from his films, this newly constructed portrait of Sergey Paradjanov was composed by the highly accomplished Armenian director Don Askarian (Komitas, Avetik). According to the director's synopsis: "The year is 1989. The place is the film festival in Rotterdam. Farewell at the Hilton Hotel. And Paradjanov says, ‘Help me make Confession’. I answer, ‘As a child of two fathers, the film will be born a bastard’."

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The story of life and death of actor Ivan Mykolaychuk - the legend of Ukrainian poetic cinema. The film is stylized as Vertep Christmas mystery: the heroes are explaining themselves with the roles they play.

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Parajanov lifts the curtain on numerous unfinished scenes and fragments of unshot films. These are memories of his childhood, death, friends, Tiflis, Kyiv, Yerevan. Seven stories from the life of Parajanov and the close circle that shared his entire life path with him.

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A film written and directed by Andrei Ayrapetov in memory of Sergei Parajanov. It was produced at Hayk Studio in Yerevan (Armenia) in 1995.

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An absorbing portrait of one of the most colorful and revered figures in world cinema, 'Paradjanov: A Requiem' offers an affectionate and insightful look at the tumultuous career of the late Sergei Paradjanov; artist, dissident, romantic and iconoclast.

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In November 1988, director Anatoly Syrykh met with Sergei Parajanov in Tbilisi to make a documentary about him. However, Parajanov was clearly not in the mood to talk about his art. As a compromise, Syrykh offers to talk about the artist and time. The tired, offended director of "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" forbids Syrykh to film him. He agrees only to speak, recalling the most unpleasant moments of his life.

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In 1989, Yurii Illienko came to Tbilisi to show Sergei Parajanov his film “Swan Lake. The Zone“, based on Parajanov's prison stories. The next day after the screening, Illienko shows the film to Soviet central party newspaper Pravda, which publishes the news of the resignation of Vladimir Shcherbytsky, who had ordered Parajanov's initial imprisonment. Illienko hands Parajanov the newspaper and turns on a household video camera. What follows is a friendly conversation between the two geniuses.

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Made in wartime and edited in candlelight, Vartanov's rarely-seen masterpiece tells about his friendship with the genius Parajanov who was imprisoned by KGB "at the height of his fame ". Vartanov resurrects the riveting scenes from his banned 1969 film The Color of Armenian Land, where Paradjanov concocts the chef-d'oeuvre The Color of Pomegranates - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - then reveals the shocking request Parajanov sent him in unpublished 1974 letters from Ukrainian prisons. Vartanov's camera documents Parajanov's staggering last day at work in 1990 during the making of the unfinished Confession - which survives in The Last Spring - as Parajanov comments on this cherished autobiographical film. The foremost achievement of The Last Spring, emphasized by critics, is Vartanov's exquisite wordless montage that "evoked the very soul" of Parajanov and earned the praise of many of cinema's greatest masters, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

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Documentary made and dedicated to Sergei Parajanov shortly after his death, featuring archive photographs, his collages, and clips from several of his films.

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Showing Sergei Parajanov at the end of his life, the film depicts the suffering of a genius against the backdrop of general anxiety and carelessness.

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The first movie about the actor who became the creator and symbol of Ukrainian poetic cinema Ivan Mykolaichuk, released 2 years after his death.

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A bunch of stories, portraits and images about people of amazing destinies, including Parajanov and Tarkovsky, merging into a non-traditional and polemic image of Armenia.

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Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

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In his wordless debut film, Mikhail Vartanov presents the ancient and modern art of Armenia through the post-impressionist painter Martiros Saryan’s silent commentary of gestures. Biblical landscapes, the ruins of temples, frescos, cross-stones, contemporary sculptures of Tchakmakchian (Chakmakchyan), the first appearance on film of iconic modernist painter Minas and his paintings, as well as the world famous behind-the-scenes episodes of Sergei Parajanov’s landmark "The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova)." The film had its first public screening at one of the world’s largest and prestigious cinematic events, the Busan International Film Festival, 43 years after it was made.

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Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1990), a brilliant filmmaker of Armenian origin, remains a legendary figure in the opposition to the Soviet regime which landed him in prison, notably for homosexuality, for years. A pilgrimage to his house in Yerevan by a French director of Russian origin who admires his work turns into a mystical experience in search of the spirit of the Master.

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Short film honoring Sergey Parajanov's Carmen puppets.

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Three short films by Sergei Parajanov, Hakob Hovnatanyan (1967), Kyiv Frescoes (1966) and Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani (1986). Scanned and restored from the original camera negatives in 4K by Fixafilm. Produced in association with National Cinema Centre of Armenia (NCCA), Dovzhenko Centre and Georgian Film. Scans for Hakob Hovnatanyan and Arabesques on the Theme of Pirosmani financed by Kino Klassika.

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Made in wartime and edited in candlelight, Vartanov's rarely-seen masterpiece tells about his friendship with the genius Parajanov who was imprisoned by KGB "at the height of his fame ". Vartanov resurrects the riveting scenes from his banned 1969 film The Color of Armenian Land, where Paradjanov concocts the chef-d'oeuvre The Color of Pomegranates - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - then reveals the shocking request Parajanov sent him in unpublished 1974 letters from Ukrainian prisons. Vartanov's camera documents Parajanov's staggering last day at work in 1990 during the making of the unfinished Confession - which survives in The Last Spring - as Parajanov comments on this cherished autobiographical film. The foremost achievement of The Last Spring, emphasized by critics, is Vartanov's exquisite wordless montage that "evoked the very soul" of Parajanov and earned the praise of many of cinema's greatest masters, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

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The Confession (1990) survives in Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992) in its original camera negative. It remained unfinished due to the death of Sergei Parajanov. The Confession (1990) was his favorite screenplay, which was written in the 1960s and was his film-memory of the childhood, student years, marriage, imprisonment and more as the fantasist Parajanov perceived it. Parajanov gifted the screenplay to Mikhail Vartanov, made a drawing on the cover and wrote: "The Confession will only be made by a director born in 1924 in Tiflis, Georgia." He predicted that he would not finish it.

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A convict is forced to hide within a model of a hammer and sickle. Here a tragic romance ensues between the convict and woman worker; which is spoilt by the woman's jealous young son. The convict is then forced to undergo a tragic bid for freedom which ends with the beauty of swans contrasted with the imprisoned convicts and the hopeful but ultimately tragic wait by the woman for her lover.

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Film about the painter Mikhail Vrubel's years in Kyiv, from a Sergei Parajanov script.

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Short film from Sergei Parajanov, a personal view of the director on the spectacular heritage of Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), a Georgian primitivist painter.

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The life of the revered 18th-century Armenian poet and musician Sayat-Nova. Portraying events in the life of the artist from childhood up to his death, the movie addresses in particular his relationships with women, including his muse. The production tells Sayat-Nova's dramatic story by using both his poems and largely still camerawork, creating a work hailed as revolutionary by Mikhail Vartanov.

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Exploring the art of Armenian portraitist Hakob Hovnatanyan, Parajanov revives the culture of Tbilisi of the 19th century.

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Parajanov's collage of all the footage that remained from his film "Kyiv Frescoes," which was halted by the Soviet authorities who demanded that all the negatives be destroyed.

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In the Carpathian Mountains of 19th-century Ukraine, love, hate, life and death among the Hutsul people are as they’ve been since time began. Ivan is drawn to Marichka, the beautiful young daughter of the man who killed his father. But fate tragically decrees that the two lovers will remain apart.

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A short diploma film based on a fairy tale by Yemelian Bukov and directed by Sergei Parajanov. The film was made in 1952, since that moment it was considered to be lost, but finally it was found in VGIK in 2025.

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