Sergei Parajanov's 1969 masterpiece "Sayat Nova" was censored, re-cut, renamed (The Color of Pomegranates) and banned; its 1969 behind-the-scenes documentary Paradjanov: The Color of Armenian Land (1969) by Mikhail Vartanov was suppressed and the footage reappeared 20 years later in Mikhail Vartanov's influential documentary Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992), which demystified the unique film language of "Sayat Nova." Parajanov's "Sayat Nova" (The Color of Pomegranates) appeared on many lists of The Greatest Films of All Time (Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinema, Movieline, Time Out, etc). Mikhail Vartanov famously wrote: "Probably, besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionary new until (Sergei Parajanov's) Sayat Nova - The Color of Pomegranates." Michelangelo Antonioni later added that the film "astonishes with its perfection of beauty."
Before Criterion's 2018 Blu-ray of the restored version, the version available on DVD was first released in its entirety in 1992. This is the version that was submitted to the Soviet censors in 1969 and rejected and re-cut considerably. There is a fuller version, longer than the director's cut still in the archives (somewhere) of Armenfilms.
Shown at the 1980 New York Film Festival without English subtitles (However for later release subtitles were added.) 34 years later, the masterpiece returned to the New York Film Festival, and was introduced by Martin Scorsese who moments earlier accepted the 2014 Parajanov-Vartanov Institute Award - named after Sergei Parajanov and Mikhail Vartanov - on behalf of the Film Foundation for the restoration of The Color of Pomegranates (1969).
Parajanov once made a speech in Minsk in which he asserted that the public very likely did not understand The Color of Pomegranates.