Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) is considered a landmark in Ukrainian cinema. This psychedelic masterpiece captivated the world with its explosion of colour, wild camerawork and deep roots in the folkloric magic of the Hutsuls. For centuries, the Hutsuls, a mountain people of the Ukrainian Carpathians, preserved their own language, rituals and ancient songs: a cultural identity that proved intolerable to Soviet authorities.

Parajanov’s refusal to dub the film into Russian and his rejection of socialist realism led to his arrest. The eccentric genius spent four years in a labour camp. Yet his vision triumphed; the film won almost every prize at international festivals in 1965, from London to San Francisco and Montreal to Mar del Plata.

Now, sixty years later, Ukrainian soprano Maryana Golovchenko and her trio are creating cinematic musical theatre using Parajanov’s visual language. In a performance that interweaves music, spoken text and projected film fragments, we discover how the filmmaker and his crew worked in the remote mountain village of Kryvorivnya, surrounded by traditional songs in a magical dialect, between Hutsul rituals and colourful costumes. It is a story about artistic resistance, about the power of cultural identity.

An online exhibition, to be unveiled in December, will provide background information on this classic film.