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January 9 marks the 99th birth anniversary of prominent Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov.

Sergei Parajanov (born Sarkis Paradjanian) was one of the 20th century's greatest film directors, who made significant contribution to Ukrainian, Armenian and Georgian cinema. He was born on 9 January 1924 to Armenian parents in Tbilisi. Parajanov’s work reflected the ethnic diversity of the Caucusus where he was raised.

His first major work was Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), which earned him an international reputation for its rich use of costume and color, and its whimsical portrayal of rural life. Possibly his greatest work, The Color of Pomegranates (1969), described the life of the Armenian poet Sayat Nova. The film angered the Soviet authorities, who claimed that it evoked nationalist sentiment.

Claiming that Parajanov promoted homosexuality, the government arrested him in 1973 and sentenced him to five years in a labor camp. A large number of prominent artists, writers and filmmakers protested his sentence, but Parajanov was only released four years later, in large part due to the efforts of French surrealist Louis Aragon. He was banned for making films for many years afterwards, when he was living in Tbilisi, but he was allowed to make The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), which captured much of the color of his earlier work.

Parajanov died of lung cancer in Yerevan in 1990, at a time when, after almost 20 years of suppression, his films were being featured at foreign film festivals. In a 1988 interview he stated that, "Everyone knows that I have three homelands. I was born in Georgia, worked in Ukraine and I'm going to die in Armenia." Parajanov was laid to rest at Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan.