[photo credit: City of Pasadena]
The Color of Pomegranates — Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 work originally titled Sayat-Nova, after the 18th-century Armenian troubadour at its center — screens at the San Rafael Branch Library, 1240 Nithsdale Rd., as part of the City of Pasadena’s Armenian Heritage Month programming. No admission fee is listed. The screening is for adults 18 and older.
The film follows Sayat-Nova from childhood to death, but not the way a biography would. Parajanov abandoned plot and nearly all dialogue, building the poet’s life instead from visual tableaux drawn from Armenian folk art, religious iconography, and textile tradition. Sayat-Nova does not speak so much as appear — surrounded by pomegranates, religious imagery, and the dense symbolism of a culture encoding itself in pictures. When Martin Scorsese introduced the restored film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, he called it “unlike anything in cinema history.”
That restoration — a 4K undertaking by Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna, world-premiered at the Cannes Film Festival — recovered what Soviet authorities had spent decades trying to suppress. Officials had objected to the film’s stylized form and its abundance of religious imagery. They removed every reference to Sayat-Nova’s name from the credits and chapter titles, retitled the work, and initially blocked its distribution outside Armenia. For years it circulated underground in a restructured form that was not Parajanov’s.
Parajanov said his inspiration was “the Armenian illuminated miniature,” and that he wanted to create “that inner dynamic that comes from inside the picture, the forms and the dramaturgy of colour.” The film bears that out: each image is composed as if it will hold still long enough to be read.
Sayat-Nova was born in 1712 and died in 1795. He composed in Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani and is celebrated across all three cultures. That breadth was part of what made his story worth telling — and part of what Soviet officials found difficult to contain.
The City of Pasadena, in its announcement of the screening, described the film as “Sergei Parajanov’s visually stunning masterpiece celebrating Armenian culture, history and identity,” adding that it “honors Armenian Heritage Month and invites viewers to experience one of cinema’s most unique works of art.”
The timing is not incidental to Pasadena. Armenians have been documented here since at least 1895, according to the Armenian Diaspora Survey; by 1923 an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 had settled in the city, many of them survivors of the Armenian Genocide. The community maintains churches, cultural institutions, and organizations with a historic concentration near Allen Avenue and Washington Boulevard. Screening a film that Soviet censors once tried to erase, in a branch library serving that community, is its own form of answer.
The San Rafael Branch meeting room seats 33. No registration is listed; the library’s number is (626) 744-7270. The branch has five on-site parking spaces. For the full library calendar, visit cityofpasadena.net/library.
The film has been suppressed, restored, and finally seen. On Friday morning in Pasadena, the doors are open.
THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES [FILM SHOWING] Date & Time: Friday, April 17, 2026 at 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Venue: San Rafael Branch Library, 1240 Nithsdale Rd., Pasadena, CA 91105 | Phone Number: 626-744-7270 | Website: https://www.cityofpasadena.net/library/?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D197159990
