Kiev Frescoes

“My classmate at (the Moscow Film Institute) VGIK, Aleksandr Antipenko, brought the footage of Kyiv Frescoes that he shot for  Parajanov and screened it for us. I immediately realized that Parajanov would be shooting his next film in this new revolutionary cinematic language”

— Mikhail Vartanov

Sergei Parajanov‘s Kiev Frescoes (Kyiv Frescos / Киевские фрески) was suppressed by Soviet Ukraine’s Dovzhenko Film Studio during production in 1966, but the approximately 14 surviving minutes of Kiev Frescoes nevertheless demonstrated a new film language (even more original than Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Parajanov  later cemented this unique cinematic language in his masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates.


Parajanov-Vartanov Institute

%d bloggers like this: