Cinema Naïf presents: Pirosmani

Director: Sergei Parajanov, Giorgi Shengelaia

1969 / 110min / DCP

In making a film of the life of the Georgian primitive artist Nikoloz Pirosmanashvili, better known as Niko Pirosmani, a peripatetic peasant painter who traded his canvases for food, drink, and shelter with little thought of a “legacy” and died penniless in 1919, Shengelaia and art director/lead actor Avtandil Varazi developed a cinematic vocabulary inspired by their subject’s singular style—his palette of pale pastels, his curiously formal figural groupings, his rustic subject matters—and produced one of the most visually striking artist biopics ever made. Preceded by Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme, a tender tribute from one iconoclastic and prodigiously brilliant Georgian artist—Sergei Parajanov—to another.

Pirosmani (Giorgi Shengelaia, 1969, 85 mins)

Arabesques on the Pirosmani Theme (Sergei Parajanov, 1985, 25 mins)

DCP courtesy of the Georgian National Film Center

Introduction by Anri Vartan, Cinema Naïf on Saturday, May 30th

Part of The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters