The Colour of Pomegranates (Sayat Nova) is a 1970 art film by the Armenian director Sergei Parajanov, considered a masterpiece by Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Antonioni. Its international appeal has lain partly in the fact that it uses a series of strong images, and is more dependent on these than dialogue, something which can prove a barrier to appeal to speakers of other languages.

Plot

This film is a biography of the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova that concentrates more on the poet's life as revealed through his poetry than through a conventional narration of important events in Sayat Nova's life. We see the poet grow up, fall in love, enter a monastery and die, but these incidents are depicted in the context of what are presumably images from Sayat Nova's poems, poems that are seen and rarely heard.