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I n an official letter to Martiros Vartanov (Parajanov: The Last
Spring), the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA)
informed that Sergei Paradjanov’s 1964 masterpiece Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors never won the British Academy Award, contrary to
what is published in the Film Encyclopedia by Ephraim Katz and
numerous other books and sources.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is widely regarded as one of the
greatest films of the 20th century and won countless awards in Italy,
Spain, Greece, Ukraine and Argentina. It was followed by another
masterpiece, The Color of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova), which Sergei
Parajanov made in Armenia in 1968 prior to his imprisonment in 1973.
"…The cinema of Sergei Parajanov began not with the Shadows of
Forgotten Ancestors…but with The Color of Pomegranates. Probably,
besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the
world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionarily new until the
Color of Pomegranates, not counting the generally unaccepted language
of the Andalusian Dog by Bunuel…" wrote Parajanov’s friend,
filmmaker Mikhail Vartanov, who recently passed away in Hollywood on
December 31st, 2009.