The Color of Pomegranates

“Color of Pomegranates. So, this… Onye Anyanwu, who’s my wife and producer, master producer, she’s requesting this. This… was a formative film for her and I when we first started dating. I’ll never forget, she turned to me one night and said… I was half asleep, and she said, 'I need a movie with great cinematography, great visuals,' and I, half-asleep, said, 'Color of Pomegranates.' She had never heard of it, and she watched it and she instantly fell in love with me.”

“This is a film by a Georgian filmmaker. His name’s Parajanov. And it’s called The Color of Pomegranates. It challenges your idea of what a film can be. Images and ritual and processions and costumes and everything. It’s fairly surreal, but if you’re okay just letting go and going with this thing and being… immersing yourself in another world, it’s pretty good that way.”

“The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov is just like a unabashedly poetic film that's ethnography, cinema, poetry, painterly, surreal but rooted really rooted I think in Armenian culture. Beautiful historical film, it's Mythic. I remember seeing it when I was on tour with The Cherry Orchard in Soviet Georgia and just being astonished by it. This was in 1986 or something.”

“This is a visual poem, this film. I randomly found it in a library, took it home, watched it, didn't know what I was watching. Definitely changed my understanding of how to make an image for a film frame. A few years ago I was in Rotterdam and they had his outtakes of stuff that's not in the film. It just took my breath away all over again. I'm really excited to revisit Parajanov, The Color of Pomegranates, because man, this film is like nothing I've ever seen.”

“This movie, The Color of Pomegranates. 'Wow' to this movie. And this one, like the music and the artwork and the colors is just, like, another level right here. How I got introduced to this movie. Tarsem was directing the R. E. M. Music video. 'Losing My Religion,' right? That whole music video is from this movie. So if, if you’re an artsy-fartsy dude like I am, this is a definite watch.”

“Color of Pomegranates, by Parajanov. Parajanov is a really fascinating filmmaker who is really into recreating folk culture with a lot of detail. And he, you know, does these beautiful tableaus that are interpretations of the art from the world that he’s trying to articulate and bring us into. And it’s really spectacular.”