Sergei 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 (the more so, the less we comprehend the actual symbolism). In tracing the life of the great 18th 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 20th century, all through daringly symbolic imagery. (Sayat Nova himself died during one of the Persian invasions.) 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 extraordinary magic. Critic J. Hoberman writes, "More understated and distanced than (Shadows), Sayat Nova achieves a sort of visionary para-surrealism through the most economical means of gesture, props and texture.... A sublime and heartbreaking film."