by Sergei Parajanov, Ukraine 1966, 15'
Presented at Secret Florence 7th edition, 2022 Copy retained by the Dovzhenko Centre Ukraine in Kyiv
The filming of this documentary on the birth of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev after World War II was interrupted because the project was declared anti-Soviet. This fragment that survived censorship demonstrates a new cinematic language. The film is built around a series of fragments of footage that form a unique collage, accompanied by a dense soundtrack in which American and French pop melodies alternate with songs of the Red Army and Orthodox liturgy.
Sergei Parajanov
Born in 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia, at the time part of the Soviet Union, he is known for his surrealist and visionary poetic style, with which he reinterpreted the popular traditions and legends of his homeland and the Caucasus regions. Because of his outspoken criticism of the Soviet authorities, his works were subject to strong censorship and he himself was imprisoned several times. In the 1970s, he spent more than five years in a Ukrainian prison. Widely celebrated throughout his life by the international film world, he has won numerous awards at major festivals, including Venice (1988), New York (1988), Rotterdam (1987), and Istanbul (1989). His films have been the subject of numerous retrospectives including those of the MoMA of New York, of the Harvard Film Archive, of the Mystetskyi Arsenal of Kyiv, of the Tbilisi History Museum, of the Odessa International Film Festival, and of the Arsenal Berlin. In 2014, the Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation, foundation set up by Martin Scorzese to safeguard the world's film heritage, restored his most famous work, The Color of Pomegranates (1969), which premiered at the 67th Cannes Film Festival (2014).