In an article published on Saturday, October 7, Maddy Pulman-Jones from the British newspaper Varsity turns to the finer films of the Soviet Union, paying particular focus to the works of Sergei Parajanov, a Soviet film director and artist of Armenian descent, who is regarded as one of the greatest visual poets of the world, reports panarmenian.net.

“Born in Soviet Tbilisi to an artistic family of Armenian descent before forging a cinematic career in the USSR, the iconoclastic pan-Caucasian auteur became a pioneer of lyric cinema. His rejection of social realism, as well as his unorthodox lifestyle, led to almost all of his work being banned when originally released in the USSR,” the article says.

The author of the article confesses that before watching the “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, she had only seen 1969’s “The Colour of Pomegranate”, which she says remains Parajanov’s most influential and controversial work.