Mikhail Vartanov

Vartanov was blacklisted for his debut film, The Color of Land (1969), where he portrayed his dissident friends Parajanov (imprisoned in 1974) and Minas (assassinated in 1975). When Vartanov's artistic freedom was restored 20 years later, he responded with Minas: A Requiem (1989) and Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992), admired by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and many other of cinema's greatest luminaries. For bravely campaigning for the release of the imprisoned Parajanov, Vartanov was fired from the Soviet Armenia's sole film studio and deprived of his only source of income (the film industry, like all others, was fully government funded and controlled). Parajanov reacted with a letter written to Vartanov from the Ukrainian prison: "You and your purity are colliding with circumstances and predators". Thanks to the tireless petitioning of his (V.G.I.K.) classmate Artavazd Peleshian and Gennadi Melkonian, Vartanov was able to work as their cinematographer and exquisitely lensed two films that became classics: Seasons (1975) and Mulberry (1979). Not until Parajanov was taken off the blacklist in 1984 (due to lobbying by celebrities) was Vartanov also permitted to direct. Even though the studio forced him to make several films such as Roots (1984), he breathed into them his trademark soulfulness. The publication of his revered Unmailed Letters essays in the top literary magazines, spurred new writings, as well as their translations all over Europe, notably in Cahiers du Cinema, in 1986. His fierce Erased Faces (1987) had terrified the colleagues who doubted the permanence of the Gorbachev reforms. In the war-torn and blockaded Armenia of the early 1990s, which was plagued by severe shortages of food, water, transportation and electricity, Vartanov's health, already compromised by decades of harassment, worsened. Despite the serious limitations, he persisted and, for the first time, independently produced what became his final film. When in Moscow, in 1993, he accepted the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts Award for Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992), in a characteristically modest move, he simply bowed, and uttered not a single word to the millions watching the live broadcast. Festival invitations for this masterwork enabled Vartanov's escape to California, but his early films remained inaccessible and under the control of his old suppressors for the rest of his life. He did not witness the first retrospective and exhibition of his films and art at the Busan International Film Festival, which took place just three years after he passed away in Hollywood.