Self
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.
Herself
Made in wartime and edited in candlelight, Mikhail Vartanov's rarely-seen masterpiece tells about his friendship with the genius Sergei Parajanov who was imprisoned by KGB "at the peak of his artistic power". Vartanov takes us back with the scenes from his censored 1969 film The Color of Armenian Land where Paradjanov is at work on his suppressed chef-d'oeuvre The Color of Pomegranates - widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time - and contrasts it with the shocking request Parajanov sent him in unpublished 1974 letters from the Soviet prisons. Vartanov's camera documents Parajanov's striking last day at work in 1990 during the making of the unfinished Confession. A monumental wordless montage - the entire sixth reel - concludes Vartanov's acclaimed documentary, which, despite the prohibitive conditions it was created in, won the admiration of many of cinema's greatest artists, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
