SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS: Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS is the centrepiece of Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO, and one of the most visually alive films ever made in the Soviet Union. Sergei Parajanov takes a tragic love story from the Hutsul communities of the Carpathians and turns it into a rush of colour, music, ritual, grief and movement.

The story follows Ivan and Marichka, whose love is shaped by family conflict, death and the force of tradition. But the film’s real power lies in how it sees the world around them. Costumes, forests, funerals, weddings, animals, tools, songs and religious rituals all become part of the film’s language. Nothing sits quietly in the background.

Parajanov had been working within Soviet cinema before this, but SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORSchanged everything. The film broke from official realism and announced a completely different way of making cinema: one built from folklore, texture, movement and cultural memory. Its vision of Ukrainian life was too specific, too intense and too independent to be absorbed easily into Soviet cultural language.

Yurii Illienko’s cinematography is a major part of that achievement. His camera moves with extraordinary freedom, turning the landscape into something physical and immediate. Illienko would later direct A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY and THE EVE OF IVAN KUPALO, both also screening this week.

Screening twice as the centrepiece of our Ukrainian Film Week, SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORSanchors the program for a reason. It’s the film where Ukrainian folklore, music, landscape and tragedy become cinema at full force by a master director loved and adored in his adopted city of Tbilisi.

You can also purchase a discounted double film pass for this feature and Illienko's A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY by visiting the Haunted Ukraine ticketing page.