Catalan International Film Festival, São Paulo International Film Festival and others. A comprehensive retrospective in the UK took place in 2010 at BFI Southbank. The retrospective was curated by Layla Alexander-Garrett and Parajanov specialist Elisabetta Fabrizi who commissioned a Parajanov-inspired new commission in the BFI Gallery by contemporary artist Matt Collishaw ('Retrospectre'). A symposium was dedicated to Paradjanov's work bringing together experts to discuss and celebrate the director's contribution to cinema and art. Early life and films Parajanov was born Sarkis Hovsepi Parajaniants (Սարգիս Հովսեփի Փարաջանյանց) to artistically-gifted Armenian parents, Iosif Paradjanov and Siranush Bejanova, in Tbilisi, Georgia; however, the family name of Parajaniants is attested by a surviving historical document at the Serhii Parajanov Museum in Yerevan. He gained access to art from an early age. In 1945, he traveled to Moscow, enrolled in the directing department at the VGIK, one of the oldest and highly respected film schools in Europe, and studied under the tutelage of directors Igor Savchenko and Oleksandr Dovzhenko. In 1948 he was convicted of homosexual acts (which were illegal at the time in the Soviet Union) with an MGB officer named Nikolai Mikava in Tbilisi. These charges were later proven false. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but was released under an amnesty after three months. In video interviews, friends and relatives contest the truthfulness of anything he was charged with. They speculate the punishment may have been a form of political retaliation for his rebellious views. In 1950 Parajanov married his first wife, Nigyar Kerimova, in Moscow. She came from a Muslim Tatar family and converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity to marry Parajanov. She was later murdered by her relatives because of her conversion. After her murder Parajanov left Russia for Kyiv, Ukraine, where he produced a few documentaries (Dumka, Golden Hands, Natalia Uzhvy) and a handful of narrative films: Andriesh (based on a fairy tale by the Moldovan writer Emilian Bukov), The Top Guy (a kolkhoz musical), Ukrainian Rhapsody (a wartime melodrama), and Flower on the Stone (about a religious cult infiltrating a mining town in the Donets Basin). He became fluent in Ukrainian and married his second wife, Svitlana Ivanivna Shcherbatiuk (1938-2020), also known as Svetlana Sherbatiuk or Svetlana Parajanova, in 1956. Shcherbatiuk gave birth to a son, Suren, in 1958. The couple eventually divorced and she and Suren relocated to Kyiv, Ukraine. Break from Soviet Realism Andrey Tarkovsky's