Legend

»I will take revenge on the world with love.«
Sergey Paradjanov

Legend tells us about the world of the famous film director Sergey Paradjanov, who remains practically unknown in the West. His works, which have been referenced by Lady Gaga among others, reflect the ethnic diversity of the regions around the Caucasus. His films bring their stories and legends to life.

Legend is not just another biography of a leading artist. Serebrennikov’s text works with Paradjanov’s visual language to present his world as a projection of our desires. Its poetic tapestry recounts worlds of colour and imagery, and the struggles of unique people and their cultures. These are eternal stories about freedom and the fight to attain it, about beauty and life’s victory over death.

Kirill Serebrennikov: »Paradjanov is an artist, a poet, who thinks and speaks to the audience not in the usual narrative way, but in visual images, pictures. These images are always bright, emotional, meaningful and paradoxical. In some ways, this is the absolute of visual cinema. An explosion of color, an explosion of fantasy, an explosion of images burns us immensely, and remains with us as a burn mark forever. The list of Paradjanov's films, that he was not able to direct, unfairly exceeds the list of the works that he managed to produce. Over the past few years, many books and articles with his unpublished, banned or lost scripts and explications have been released. There is a whole community of fans and connoisseurs of Sergey Paradjanov. Bit by bit they collect what belongs to Paradjanov’s world: collages, apocrypha, aphorisms and anecdotes, drawings, letters.

Paradjanov’s films show that any beauty demands cruelty and is very often owed to human blood and sacrifice. The whole life of Sergey Paradjanov is a sacrifice, that he made, so that there would be as much beauty in the world, as possible.«