THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES (1969) | Sergei Parajanov

There are films. And then there are visions.

Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates is not a film to be watched, but to be experienced—wordlessly, like a memory of something ancient and sacred. What Parajanov created is not cinema as we know it, but something closer to ritual, dream, or icon. It is a film where meaning does not arise through plot, but through presence. Where time is not measured in scenes, but in silences.

This is the second unveiling in The Lost Gallery.

In Parajanov’s hands, the screen ceases to be a frame for events and becomes a canvas for the ineffable. The life of the 18th-century Armenian troubadour Sayat-Nova is not narrated—it is intuited, refracted through symbols, liturgy, gesture. Books bleed. Pomegranates burst. Eyes weep pearls. Nothing is literal, yet everything is real. The material world becomes translucent, like a window in a monastery, stained with the colours of mysticism.

In the Soviet era, where cinema was shackled to realism and narrative utility, Parajanov broke free. He painted with celluloid. He composed with silence. What Eisenstein did with montage, Parajanov does with icon. Andrei Tarkovsky—himself no stranger to sacred cinema—called The Colour of Pomegranates one of the greatest films ever made.

It is for this reason that we enshrine it in The Lost Gallery.

This film does not plead to be understood. It offers itself like a relic—enigmatic, incorruptible. It does not condescend to the viewer, but invites the viewer to ascend. In this way, it is more like a temple visit than a viewing experience. The rituals are unfamiliar, but the atmosphere is unmistakably sacred.

And what does it offer us today, in a time when cinema is often reduced to content, and images to distraction?

It offers stillness. It offers symbolism. It offers mystery, and beauty, and the right to not explain.

In a culture of over-explanation, The Colour of Pomegranates dares to be incomprehensible—and thereby eternal.

This is not a film for the market. It is not for programming. It is for preservation.

Let it be placed—alongside Andrei Rublev, and others to come—as proof that cinema, too, can be sacred.

"I am a man whose dreams came true, and who suffered for it." — Sergei Parajanov