Pirosmani deals with the life of the great Georgian primitive artist Niko Pirosmanishvili, who worked prior to 1920. Shengelaya avoids the usual clichés of films about artists' lives, successfully experimenting with color control techniques based on the painter's style. Avtandi Varazi plays the gentle, uncompromising artist who sold his paintings to bars and restaurants for food and drink, and worked mostly in solitude. After its American premiere at PFA in 1974, this delicate and poetic film won the Grand Prize at the Chicago Film Festival and went on to play in New York to critical acclaim. In 1978 a New Yorker review called it "a splendid and innovative work of poetic biography. Shengelaya understands an unusual amount of the creative process."