Each film deals with a different then-Soviet minority: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is about the Hutzul Ukrainians living in the Carpathian Mountains sometime in the 19th century; The Color of Pomegranates is Armenian and built around the life of Sayat-Nova, a famous folksinger of the 18th century; The Legend of the Suram Fortress is based on a 19th century Georgian novella by Daniel Chonkadze and set in the medieval period; Ashik Kerib is based on a Mikhail Lermontov story written in the 1830s but set in Azerbaijani folklore. He made ten films before 1964, but he disowned them all because they were made in the socialist realist style. Parajanov only made four films after 1965 because of political pressure, time in a gulag camp in the 1970s, and a ban from film-making until the 1980s.
