YEREVAN, MARCH 20, ARMENPRESS: Moscow Oriental Museum has opened an exhibition dedicated to the 90th birth anniversary of Sergei Parajanov. Armenpress reports citing the website of Itar-Tass agency that the organizers have tried to convey the spirit of old Tbilisi and image of the film director as an integral part of it.

“For the first time we have tried to show Sergei Parajanov not as a film director as he is shown from time to time, but as an absolute “product” of Tbilisi. Only there a person could be born who shot national films for Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. He absorbed within him the soul of that multi-national city,” the owner of the collection Aram Babloyan said.

Sergei Parajanov was Soviet Armenian film director and artist who made significant contributions to Ukrainian, Armenian and Georgian cinema. He invented his own cinematic style, which was totally out of step with the guiding principles of socialist realism (the only sanctioned art style in the USSR). This, combined with his controversial lifestyle and behaviour, led Soviet authorities to repeatedly persecute and imprison him, and suppress his films.

Although he started professional film-making in 1954, Parajanov later disowned all the films he made before 1964 as "garbage". After directing Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (renamed Wild Horses of Fire for most foreign distributions) Parajanov became something of an international celebrity and simultaneously a target of attacks from the system. Still, it required the help of influential Georgian actor Dodo Abashidze and other friends to have his last feature films greenlighted. His health seriously weakened by four years in labor camps and nine months in prison in Tbilisi, Parajanov died of lung cancer in 1990, at a time when, after almost 20 years of suppression, his films were being featured at foreign film festivals. "Everyone knows that I have three Motherlands. I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I'm going to die in Armenia." - Sergei Parajanov, 1988.