The Cinematheque

“One of the supreme works of the Soviet sound cinema … The plot is affecting, but it serves Parajanov mainly as an armature to support the exhilarating rush of his lyrical camera movements [and] his astonishing handling of colour and music.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Before Sergei Parajanov filtered desire and poetry through the symbolic tableaux of The Colour of Pomegranates, he made this equally stunning work of dynamic, mythic romantic fate. Parajanov called Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors his true first film, the one where he found his themes—ethnography, god, love, and tragedy—and also found the form to suit them. Ivan and Marichka are star-crossed lovers: there’s a blood feud between their families, and the forest in which they find a secluded space to share is also a bewitched environ that might spell their doom. Commissioned on the occasion of Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s centenary, Parajanov’s film is an imagined recreation of a folk tradition that had largely moved on when he set out to film the tale’s villages and mountains—seeing asphalt encroaching on the Carpathian wilderness, he said, ​“I was not exactly gripped by enchantment.” The film’s frenetic, shocking sense of wild beauty imagines otherwise.

In Hutsul with English subtitles

“With its vision of nature in Dionysian riot, its chorus lines of extravagantly costumed peasants, and its shifting point of view, it is hard to tell where ethnography ends in this extraordinary film, and where fantasy begins.”

Dave Kehr, The New York Times

“We wanted to make a film about passions understandable to every person, and tried to convey these passions in a word, a melody, in every tangible thing. And, of course, in colour.”

Sergei Parajanov