Three short films by Sergey Parajanov have been restored for the first time in 2018. In Akop Ovnatanyan and Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme the director’s unique visual language reveals its interrelationship with nineteenth-century painting. The banned and unfinished Kiev Frescoes represents Parajanov’s avant-garde view on the tragedy of war.
Akop Ovnatanyan
A film about Akop Ovnatanyan—the classic of Armenian painting and one of the best nineteenth-century European portrait masters.
Akop Ovnatanyan
Director Sergey Parajanov
USSR, 1967. 8 minutes. 0+
Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme
In this short, Sergey Parajanov depicts his personal view of the painterly heritage of Nico Pirosmani, nineteenth-century Georgian primitivist artist, outstanding self-trained master, one of the world’s leading representatives of “naïve art.”
Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme
Director Sergey Parajanov
USSR, 1986. 25 minutes. 0+
Kiev Frescoes
This unfinished avant-garde picture by Sergey Parajanov displays the tragedy of war via clear visual—pictorial—images.
Following the Kiev Frescoes screen tests, the film studio’s management decided to stop the production of “an impressionist picture permeated with the idea pacifism.” As a result, only fifteen-minute tests have remained from the film, thanks to the trick of cinematographer Alexander Antipenko who pretended that it was his thesis. After these etudes to an incomplete movie were shown during Parajanov’s retrospective at the International Film Festival in Munich in 1988, the world’s top film critics recognized them as “an innovative discovery” and “a brilliant experience of avant-garde in film.”
Kiev Frescoes
Director Sergey Parajanov
USSR, 1966. 25 minutes. 12+
