Paradjanov's first film after his Ukrainian masterpiece Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors was a paean to his own Armenian heritage, an exotic mosaic of the mystical and historical that achieves a surreal effect. In tracing the life of the great eighteenth-century Armenian poet and monk Sayat Nova through his writings, Paradjanov weaves a metaphorical short history of the Armenian nation, telling of Turkish genocide, Persian invasions, and a vast migration to the Russian section in the early twentieth century, all through daringly symbolic imagery. Beyond this the film is an extraordinary artistic rendering of ceremony and ritual, architecture, iconography and color symbology (e.g. the color of pomegranates) that, even for the uninitiated, works its magic. "A sublime and heartbreaking film" (J. Hoberman).