Sergei Parajanov

January 9, 1924 — July 20, 1990

Film director

Director of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. He worked at Kyiv’s Dovzhenko Film Studios for over twenty years and was arrested in his Kyiv flat in 1973.

Biography

Sergei Parajanov was born in Tbilisi on 9 January 1924 into an Armenian family. After graduating from the Moscow film institute VGIK in 1951 he was assigned to the Kyiv film studio (later named after Dovzhenko), and Kyiv was his home for more than twenty years. Here he made Andriesh, The First Lad, Ukrainian Rhapsody and Flower on the Stone.

International fame came with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), after Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Its Kyiv premiere on 4 September 1965 at the Ukraina cinema made history when Ivan Dziuba, Viacheslav Chornovil and Vasyl Stus addressed the audience in protest against arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. Afterwards Parajanov’s projects were increasingly blocked; Kyiv Frescoes (1966) was never completed.

On 17 December 1973 he was arrested in his Kyiv flat, and in April 1974 he was sentenced to five years in a strict-regime labour camp. Released at the end of 1977, he settled in Tbilisi. He died in Yerevan on 20 July 1990. In December 2023 Ukraine’s National Rehabilitation Commission fully rehabilitated him.

In Kyiv he lived on Peremohy Avenue (now Beresteiskyi Avenue), where a memorial plaque has been installed; in 2016 a lane in the Shevchenkivskyi district was named after him.

Kyiv in their life

Dovzhenko Film Studios – worked here from the early 1950s until 1973 and made Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.
Ukraina cinema (Arkhitektora Horodetskoho St) – the Shadows premiere of 4 September 1965 and the Dziuba–Chornovil–Stus protest.
Peremohy Avenue (now Beresteiskyi) – the building where he lived and was arrested in 1973; memorial plaque.
Serhiya Paradzhanova Lane – named in 2016.