Black Square presents: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Void Micro Cinema is teaming up with GS Film Minds, a Winnipeg-based film education project founded by producer and educator Julia Sharipova, to bring a diverse and wide-ranging survey of world cinema to Winnipeg with the ongoing screening series Black Square.

With our second screening, Black Square is thrilled to share a new restoration of Sergei Parajanov's seminal film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which has lost none of its magical power as an exemplar of pure cinematic wonder.
Shadows of Forgotten AncestorsDirected by Sergei Parajanov1965 | Ukraine | 96 minutesWidely considered the most important film in the history of Ukranian cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a masterwork that boldly combines folkloric pageantry, fairy tale mysticism, and frenetic, hallucinatory cinematography. Adapted from Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s novel, Shadows tells the story of Ivan (Ivan Mykolaichuk), a young Hutsul peasant who witnesses his father’s murder by the local miser. Years later, Ivan falls in love with the miser’s daughter, Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova), but her shocking death leaves him wallowing in grief until he meets Palahna (Tatyana Bestayeva), a beautiful woman who seems to restore his faith in life and hope for the future. When the ghost of Marichka begins to haunt Ivan, however, Palahna is driven into the arms of the local sorcerer (Spartak Bagashvili), with tragic results. Shadows is steeped in the earthy atmosphere of the Carpathian mountains; filmed by Parajanov and cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko with an eye for constantly innovative camera movements and vivid color; and suffused by Hutsul culture in the form of composer Myroslav Skoryk’s collage-like score, which brings together Ukrainian folk melodies with modernist, experimental orchestration. It is one of cinema’s singular productions, capturing the spiritual majesty of the past by creatively forging the medium’s future.

"As Parajanov's camera swirls vertiginously to capture harvest festivals and celebrations, you sense a linkage of past and present that's astounding." - Joshua Rothkop, Time Out
"Sergei Paradjanov's extraordinary merging of myth, history, poetry, ethnography, dance, and ritual... remains one of the supreme works of the Soviet sound cinema, and even subsequent Paradjanov features have failed to dim its intoxicating splendors." - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
"In this overwhelmingly beautiful movie, a sad, short, brutalized life is elevated to ecstatic myth." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Screening copy courtesy of The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project