"The greatest Soviet film since the war" (David Robinson), this poetic chronicle of the life of an 18th-century Armenian poet is widely considered to be Paradjanov’s masterpiece. Condemned by Soviet authorities as "hermetic and obscure," shelved for four years, re-edited and circulated only in bootleg prints until the 1980s, Pomegranates consists of a set of exquisite tableaux, derived from such sources as silent Soviet cinema, Quattrocento painting, and Byzantine icons. A stunning mixture of the medieval and the modernist and of pagan and Christian themes, Pomegranates is "an extraordinarily beautiful film ... a truly sublime and heart-breaking film" (J. Hoberman, Village Voice).