When Shadows first appeared in the West, critics proclaimed its director the heir to Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. Now certified as a classic of world cinema, the film won more than a dozen prizes at international festivals, but was condemned by Soviet authorities as a work of "formalism" and "Ukranian nationalism." Parajanov transformed an ancient Carpathian folk legend about two lovers, whose families are embroiled in a blood-feud, into a dizzying, rhapsodic pageant of sex, death, madness, myth, and ritual. Filming amongst the Gutsul tribe in the Carpathian mountains, Parajanov and his cinematographer, Yuri Ilyenko, conceived Shadows as a "dramaturgy of color" to summon up a world of pagan myth, blood, lust, and spiritual devastation.