ASHIK KERIB   1988
(აშიკ-ქერიბი,  Ashug-Karibi)
Directed by Sergei Parajanov
78 minutes
In Georgian with English subtitles

This is the gorgeously photographed final feature film by one of the most visionary post-war Soviet directors, Sergi Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates). Andrei Tarkovsky was a deep friend of his, and also one of his firmest defenders. This movie is based on a folk tale transcribed by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov, about a traveling minstrel musician called Ashik. He falls in love with a local girl, but when her father rejects him, he is forced to aimlessly roam the countryside for 1001 nights. Before he sets out on his journey, he asks the girl not to marry anyone else before he returns.

Soviet / Armenian / Georgian filmmaker Parajanov is a breed of his own, mixing experimental aesthetics with ethnic mythology and coming up with a wild, icon-exploding cinema. He created meticulously detailed tableaux vivants composed of Azerbaijani costumes, music and dance, and mixed them with beautifully haunting music scores. Each of the set pieces are almost like moving paintings, often bordering on the psychedelic, building a bridge between the ancient and modern. Parajanov's cinema dispenses with the fixation on heavy dialog-driven storyline, and instead plunges into a narrative of intoxicating visuals, a heady fusing of myth and magic. Mystical Soviet cinema, and one of the great poetic filmmakers of all time.

This will be a high-definition screening.

+ short film:CloudAboveParadise.jpg
A CLOUD ABOVE PARADISE  1999
(Oblako nad rayem)
Directed by Alexander Tsatsvev
20 minutes

A film by Russian director Alexander Tsatsvev with lyrical aesthetics about a dark theme - the lasting effects of the Chernobyl disaster on a small Russian village. Here paradise and the sinister are intertwined, as we follow two youths wandering through a garden one decade after the nuclear reactor tragedy.