‘SPECIAL SCREENING: Sayat Nova (The Color of Pomegranates) - Sergei Parajanov’

A painstaking restoration of Sergei Parajanov's 1968 masterpiece, a highly unconventional biopic of the eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova Sayat Nova (Harutyun Sayatyan 1712 or 22 - 1795) recounted in a succession of opulently exotic tableaux.

"Watching Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates, aka Sayat Nova is like opening a door and walking into another dimension, where time has stopped and beauty has been unleashed. On a very basic level, it's a biography of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova, but before all else it's a cinematic experience, and you come away remembering images, repeated expressive movements, costumes, objects, compositions, colours." —Martin Scorsese

With Sergei Parajanov's death in 1990, cinema lost one of its last true poets. Despite persistent persecution and long-term imprisonment in the Soviet gulag, Parajanov made several films unparalleled for their hermetic beauty and formal innovation. Soon after completing Sayat Nova — a visually dazzling biography of the eponymous eighteenth-century Armenian poet and musician related through a succession of opulently exotic tableaux, hieratic as Byzantine icons one moment, fleshily sensual the next — Parajanov was imprisoned for "trafficking in art objects and currency, spreading venereal disease, incitement to suicide, homosexuality and anti-Soviet agitation," and spent much of the subsequent decade in and out of jail, during which time his devotion to art and the making of beauty remained undiminished.