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Above: Soviet-export poster for Ashik Kerib. Design by “Lem.”On January 9 of this year, the legendary, often beleaguered and utterly sui generis filmmaker Sergei Parajanov would have turned 100 years old. Parajanov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1924 to Armenian parents, just seven years after the Russian Revolution. He died in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1990 at the age of 66, only a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His life and career were very much defined by the strictures of the Ussr, including four years spent in a labor camp in the mid-’70s on trumped-up charges of crimes against the state, and numerous personal projects that were banned, censored, or shut down by Soviet film administrations.One of the world’s most exceptional filmmakers, Parajanov managed to make only eight feature films in his four-decade-long career. His first four socialist realist features were made at the Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv and,...

AndreischAfter the staggering success of Shadows of The Forgotten Ancestors (1965), which won awards in London, New York, Mar Del Plata and Montreal, Sergei Parajanov was thrust onto the world stage as one of the most original filmmakers in the business. Depicting the conventions of the Hutsul people of the Carpathian mountains, it was a brave new step in Soviet filmmaking due to its restless camerawork, intense subjectivity, and ambiguous tone. The positive reception would inform his later work, a triumph of the local, celebrating ancient customs and dress in a visually dazzling fashion. To celebrate his legacy, Arsenal Kino in Berlin, supported by the Embassy of the Republic of Armenia, presented all eight of Parajanov’s feature films this fall, allowing audiences to see how the acclaimed filmmaker changed from studio-tied hack to inimitable auteur. When talking about Parajanov’s filmmaking and style, critics will invariably focus on his last four films—Forgotten Ancestors,...