A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

If you agree that the medium of movie films has a lot to do with colours, lights and sounds, you should see this 1964 Georgian movie. The storyline is simple - it's a tragic folklore of a village hero from 19th century Georgia. It has the elements of love and revenge, but that's not what you see this movie for. I haven't seen one like this before - a movie whose each frame bursts with color (at times deliberate lack of it) bringing a stream of beautiful art passing before your eyes! The sound complements it too with folk music and sounds of life. The whole experience is magnetic and artful. And that it came from Georgian cinema in the 1960's would surprise you. But even without that prejudice, this is a movie that will delight you like no other. It deserves the label 'Poetry in motion'

Hunter S Thompson once wrote, "it never got weird enough for me." If he were alive I'd ask if ever laid his crazed genius eyes on this. It makes the feverish camera if I Am Cuba look as minimalist as Stranger Than Paradise. Near the cameraman isn't AS insane in the last third of the film as in the rest, but it's still such a virtuoso directing and it using light and sound and horses and houses and uh skeletons on tree branches and ALL THE IMAGERY Jesus Christ EVER INSPIRED. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors calls out for a different way to make cinema that is ambitious and delirious and so out there as to be both sacred AND profane, if that can make any sense. A part of me may even love the film for how much it embraces the wild and the visual, like if it was done during the silent film era it might be even stronger (albeit we would lose the many Russian songs and music which is part of the whole piece it is). There are no rules that can't be broken for Parajanov which is liberating and thrilling. And dangerous. If only I could connect more to Ivankos plight and struggle instead of admiring it on a technical level (yeah I think I'm turning into that asshole on the movie like in Annie Hall), if Parajanov made Ivankos interior struggle or the mania that his wife succumbs to once into sorcery and lust in another man, then it would be a masterpiece (possibly). Since the movie Is presented in such a subjective way I can't help but respond to what I see as honestly as possible, and it's both impressive for just how far this director and his DP get on the train to complete abandon of realism while at the same time leaving me... cold somehow, on a first viewing. I must stress that the issue may be more with me - I understand what is going on, how much the film is sad and heart rending like a poem that is howling to the winds and heavens, and the actors sell it best they can - and I don't regret seeing it for a second. Holy vodka sauce batman this may take some time to process... But go see it if you want to be challenged by the conventions of the form.

After I saw "Pomegranates" I looked very much forward to seeing this film. As others have commented, it is visually astounding - the entire work. It is also very foreign. The film takes place in the Ukraine and the language is Ukrainian, the action taken from folk stories occurs centuries before in a culture as foreign to the Western European mind as if it had been shot in the Far East with little attempt to explain it as it rolls along. I am a professional performing musician and one of the valuable lessons I've learned over the years was that the public can take only so much "foreigness" in an artistic work before the brain tunes it out - or shuts it down. The sound track was the culprit here where crying became wailing and bawling, singing became intoning at best or screeching and people tended to scream rather than talk with each other. It was a very loud track and became unpleasant and over-stressed with little interruption. The noise in itself was absolutely exhausting. True, these were unfamiliar times with unfamiliar people and unusual instruments and music, but as I mentioned above, the mind tunes them out, whether we like it or not.Curtis Stotlar

The first major movie by the Georgian-born Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov (he has made some movies before that few people have seen, and they are apparently in the conventional Soviet style). This is set in a village in Western Ukraine, in the forested Carphatian Mountains, among the Hutsul ethnic group. The movie has a great opening, as a man is killed by a falling tree over a snow-covered mountain, with a POV from the top of the tree. After that, you get Paradjanov, with its frantic mixture of ethnography, folklore, religion, odd camera movements, music, dance, color. Among all this, a sort of plot emerges, with the story of the crazy love between Ivan and Marichka, a couple belonging to feuding families, and of Ivan's life and marriage with another woman called Palagna after Marichka's tragic death. The era in which the action takes place is never determined, though one suspects it is some centuries ago. On the whole, I like Paradjanov's future feature The Color of Pomegranates better, which I think it's far more accomplished, but I this is very much well worth seeing to any cinema lover.