The Color of Pomegranates

Sergei Parajanov’s paean to his Armenian heritage is 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, Parajanov weaves a metaphorical short history of the Armenian nation, telling of Turkish genocide, Persian invasions, and a vast migration to the Russian section of the country in the early twentieth century, all through daringly symbolic imagery. The film is an extraordinary artistic rendering of ceremony and ritual, architecture, iconography, and period music that, even for the uninitiated, works its extraordinary magic.