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A journalist discovers her husband’s infidelity in a poetic, pleasingly surreal drama by Georgian director Lana Gogoberidze

There’s a restless, bustling nervous energy to this Georgian movie from 1978; it’s a romantic comedy of manners from director and co-writer Lana Gogoberidze with a freewheeling kind of New Wave feel, set in a city for which the term Swinging Tbilisi isn’t quite right, but certainly a busy, modern place for busy, modern people.

Georgian actor Sofiko Chiaureli, known for her collaborations with Sergei Parajanov and an icon for her appearance in his The Colour of Pomegranates, plays Sofiko, a high-powered newspaper interviewer, known for her sympathetic “human interest” pieces featuring ordinary women telling her about their lives. Sofiko is always dashing about town in her mackintosh and quizzical glasses (which make her look a bit like Isabelle Huppert) accompanied by dishevelled photographer Irakli (Janri Lolashvili), who may be in love with her.

Maria Saakyan's The Lighthouse (2006) is exclusively showing on Mubi in the Rediscovered series.In the opening seconds of Maria Saakyan’s The Lighthouse, an off-screen character opens a burned-out book and thumbs through it with great care before settling on a page of faded and lightly smudged Armenian text. This object is lit hard but simply, with a reverence for its aura and texture, the crags and valleys that it contains in its damage. It’s an iconic image that bookends and ripples through a film that deals in startling montage that collides old imagery with new, mountainous landscapes in turn beautiful and war-torn, and poetic, fantastical flourishes that have elicited many comparisons to Andrei Tarkovsky. While his formal legacy is certainly felt in some aspects, Saakyan, who passed away from cancer in 2018, was a cinematic poet in her own right, and carried on a legacy of poetry through her...

I. Home, Uninhabitable “It’s impossible to live here.” These words are uttered by Lena, who's just arrived back home to her village in the Caucasus, where there’s been a war on for two years. Childhood is over, and geopolitical conflict has warped her surroundings. She intends to collect her grandparents and take them back with her to Moscow, but is soon trapped, when the trains stop running. Armenian director Maria Saakyan’s The Lighthouse immerses us in the mind of a woman for whom real sanctuary exists only in memories. Impossible to live in one’s home as it was, but impossible not to return obsessively in dreams—it’s the in-between fate of exiles which Saakyan, who relocated from Yerevan to Moscow with her family in 1992 amid the region’s political turmoil, knew all too well. She turned to a poetic, uncanny cinematic language to grapple with...

Guest reviewer Lee Broughton assesses the Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s poetic and metaphor-filled biopic about his countryman Sayat Nova, the Armenian poet-troubadour. This new disc edition offers both versions of the picture, Parajanov’s original and the Soviet-approved version cut by seven minutes. As we learn, if a Soviet film director found favor internationally, they often landed in trouble back home.

The Colour of Pomegranates

Region B Blu-ray

Second Sight (UK)

1969 / Color / 1.33 flat full frame / 79 min. / Sayat Nova, Nran Guyne / Street Date, 19 Feb 2018 / £29.99

Starring: Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Alekyan, Vilen Galstyan, Gogi Gegechkori, Spartak Bagashvili, Medea Japaridze, Hovhannes Minasyan.

Cinematography: Suren Shakhbazyan

Film Editor: Marfa Ponomarenko

Production Designer: Stepan Andranikyan

Original Music: Tigran Mansuryan

Written and Directed by Sergei Parajanov

Reviewed by Lee Broughton

Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates is a film with a troubled release history. The Russian censor ruled that Parajanov’s initial cut of the...

Sergei Paradjanov made some of the most beautiful films ever seen, writes Elif Batuman. His reward was to be sent to the gulag for 'surrealist tendencies'

Between his abandonment of socialist realism in 1964 and his death from lung cancer in 1990, Sergei Paradjanov made four of the weirdest and most beautiful movies ever seen. An ethnic Armenian, Paradjanov was born in Soviet Georgia in 1924. His mother was "very artistic": she "used to adorn herself with Christmas tree decorations and curtains and join her friends on the roof to enact legends". In 1947, Paradjanov spent a brief stint in a Georgian prison for committing "homosexual acts" (which were illegal under Soviet law) – with, of all people, a Kgb officer. He later disavowed the seven films he shot in the 1950s and early 1960s. In 1962, he saw Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and completely changed his artistic method, which had previously been quite normal.

The...