Watch banned masterpiece The Color of Pomegranates, which Milos helped smuggle out of Paris for its U.S. premiere at FACETS.  

 A breathtaking fusion of poetry, ethnography, and cinema, Sergei Parajanov’s masterwork overflows with unforgettable images and sounds. In a series of tableaux that blend the tactile with the abstract, The Color of Pomegranates revives the splendors of Armenian culture through the story of the eighteenth-century troubadour Sayat-Nova, charting his intellectual, artistic, and spiritual growth through iconographic compositions rather than traditional narrative.  

 The film’s tapestry of folklore and metaphor departed from the realism that dominated the Soviet cinema of its era, causing Soviet censors to ban the film and leading to an eventual prison sentence for director Sergei Parajanov. Because of this, for years the film was only seen at underground screenings in a reconstructed form. 

 Milos Stehlik, FACETS Founder, and his collaborators on the first Amnesty International Festival of Film and Human Rights were an important part of this history: in the 1980s, they worked to smuggle the film from Paris to Chicago for its U.S. Premiere with the help of an Armenian resistance organization and U.S. Department of Agriculture employee.  

 Read about the wild journey of The Color of Pomegranates in Milos’s own words here.