Now in DVD, this 1969 film by Sergi Paradjanov is a remarkable achievement.

Paradjanov (1924-1990 has been acclaimed as the greatest Russian filmmaker to appear since the golden age of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. His baroque masterpiece, The Color of Pomegranates, was banned in Russia for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to socialist realism. Its director, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave or protest from the international community lead to his release in 1978.

Aesthetically the most extreme film ever made in the USSR, The Color of Pomegranates is a hallucinatory epic account of the life of the 18th century national poet Sayat Nova. It conveys the glory of what a cinema of high art can be like. Conceived as an extraordinarily complex series of painterly tableaux that recall Byzantine mosaics, the film is a dreamlike icon come-to-life of astonishing beauty and rigor. It evokes the poet's childhood and youth, his days as a troubadour at the court of King Heraclius II of Georgia, his retreat to a monastery, his old age, and his death.

There has never been a film like this magical work. Featuring Sophico Tchiaourelli, M. Alekian, V. Galestian, G. Gueguetchkori, and O. Minassian.

Color, 88 minutes, in Russian, with English subtitles.