Sergei Parajanov, claimed by three nations and jailed by the Soviets

Sergei Parajanov

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	January 9, 1924 Tbilisi, Georgia
Died	July 20, 1990 (66)
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Color of Pomegranates, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Ashik Kerib
Awards	State Prize of the Armenian SSR · Shevchenko National Prize · Best Director, Sitges Film Festival

In the Tbilisi courtyard where he spent his last free years, Sergei Parajanov received visitors as if he were staging a scene. Dolls sewn from scraps sat beside collages pasted onto whatever cardboard came to hand. The rooms looked like a film set because, for long stretches of his life, a film set was the one thing the Soviet system would not give him. He is counted today among the most original directors cinema has produced, yet in the decade after his breakthrough he was allowed to finish a single feature, and the films that made his name were the same ones that made him a target.

Andrei Tarkovsky put it more sharply than any critic, in a letter to the Communist Party’s Central Committee written days before his friend was sentenced. Parajanov had made only two films in ten years, Tarkovsky wrote, both had changed cinema far beyond Ukraine, and the man was “guilty of his solitude.” He never fitted the studios of Kyiv, Yerevan or Tbilisi, and each of those cities now claims him. “Everyone knows that I have three motherlands,” he said near the end. “I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I’m going to die in Armenia.”

He was born Sargis Parajanyan in Tiflis, today’s Tbilisi, on 9 January 1924, to Armenian parents. His father, Iosif, dealt in antiques, a trade the authorities treated as speculation and raided accordingly; the boy grew up among precious objects that could be confiscated at any moment, and it shows in every frame he later composed. He studied singing at the conservatory in Tbilisi and then in Moscow before moving to the directing department of the state film institute, VGIK, where his teachers were Igor Savchenko and Oleksandr Dovzhenko.

In Moscow he married Nigyar Kerimova, who came from a Muslim Tatar family; her relatives, who opposed the marriage, murdered her after she converted to Orthodox Christianity. Parajanov moved to Kyiv and the Dovzhenko studio, learned Ukrainian, and in 1956 married Svitlana Shcherbatiuk. Their son, Suren, was born two years later. The features he directed there in the 1950s, among them Andriesh and Ukrainian Rhapsody, were dutiful studio work that he would later dismiss as “garbage.”

What changed him was Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood, proof that a Soviet film could think in images rather than slogans. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, adapted from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel about Hutsul lovers divided by a blood feud in the Carpathians, was shot in Ukrainian and in the local dialect, with Yuri Illienko’s camera whirling through forests and a Hutsul wedding. Parajanov refused to dub it into Russian. At its Kyiv premiere, at the Ukraina cinema on 4 September 1965, the critic Ivan Dziuba, the journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil and the poet Vasyl Stus used the screening to protest the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. The film won prizes abroad; at home the KGB filed reports calling its director a harmful influence on the young.

His next project, Kyiv Frescoes, was halted after test footage. He went to Armenia and made Sayat Nova, a portrait of the eighteenth-century Armenian troubadour told almost without dialogue, in tableaux. Books lie open to dry on a monastery roof; a pomegranate bleeds into a white cloth; Sofiko Chiaureli plays six roles, male and female. The censors complained that it taught the public nothing about the poet. The title became The Color of Pomegranates, the poet’s name was stripped from the credits, and the film opened in Armenia in October 1969 in a 77-minute cut. For the limited release elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the director Sergei Yutkevich reordered scenes and trimmed it further.

In December 1973 Parajanov was arrested in Kyiv. The charges included homosexual acts, then a crime in the Soviet Union, and spreading pornography, and he was sentenced to five years in a hard-labour camp. Abroad the case was read as political, and those who protested included Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Luis Buñuel. He served four years. His release in December 1977 followed a direct request from the French poet Louis Aragon to Leonid Brezhnev. In the camp, often denied materials, he made around 800 drawings and collages, along with dolls.

The canon has since tidied him up, and that is its own distortion. Ukrainian, Armenian and Georgian cinema each tell a Parajanov in their own image: the dissident of the Kyiv premiere, the keeper of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, the aesthete of Tbilisi courtyards. Each version drops what does not fit, starting with Ashik Kerib, his last finished feature, a celebration of the Azerbaijani world of Lermontov’s tale. Parajanov made the job harder. He was a compulsive fabulist who turned his prison years into anecdotes so outrageous that biographers still have to separate the story from the record. And the films themselves resist the reverence they now receive: he conceded that anyone watching The Color of Pomegranates without background would have no idea what they were seeing. “Whoever tries to imitate me is lost,” he reportedly said, and few have tried.

Back in Tbilisi he lived under close watch, was arrested again in 1982 on bribery charges and freed within a year, his health badly damaged. With Georgian backing he returned to directing. The Legend of Suram Fortress, co-directed with Dodo Abashidze from the Georgian legend of a young man walled alive so a fortress will stand, earned him the best director prize at the Sitges festival in 1986. Ashik Kerib followed in 1988, the story of a wandering minstrel, dedicated to Tarkovsky, who had died two years earlier, “and to all the children of the world.”

He was shooting The Confession, an autobiographical project he had carried for two decades, when lung cancer stopped him. He died in Yerevan on 20 July 1990, aged 66. What survives of the footage lives in Mikhail Vartanov’s documentary Parajanov: The Last Spring. The museum he helped plan in Yerevan opened in 1991 and holds some 1,400 exhibits.

The work keeps moving. On 17 November 2026 the Criterion Collection releases Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors on 4K and Blu-ray in a new restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, introduced by Martin Scorsese. In June a strike on the Dovzhenko studios in Kyiv was first reported to have destroyed the film’s costumes; the studio later told the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute they had been stored elsewhere and survived. What his films argue, sixty years on, is that a culture can be carried in objects, a carpet, a pomegranate, a pair of newlyweds yoked together, when the words for it are forbidden. The censors cut Sayat Nova for explaining nothing. That refusal to explain is exactly why restorers keep coming back to it.

Tags: Sergei Parajanov, Soviet cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ashik Kerib, Dodo Abashidze, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

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