Box office The theatrical release of
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors had enjoyed a limited commercial success in UkrSSR and other republics of the USSR. The film drew an impressive 6.5 million (according to some sources 8.5 million) admissions during its theatrical run from 1965 to 1966 across the UkrSSR and other republics of the USSR. This was the second best of Parajanov's movies, only behind his 1959 communist kolhosp flick
The Top Guy which amassed 21.7 million admissions in domestic USSR box-office.
Critical response The film was released in March 1965 to generally favourable reviews from Anglophone film critics from abroad and mixed reviews from Ukrainian film critics from
UkrSSR. The 1967 edition of
Britannica Book of the Year listed
Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors among four stand-out films that came out that year from Eastern Europe and called it a "free-wheeling, extravagantly sumptuous saga". On the
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 93% based on 40 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10.The website's critical consensus states: "
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors impresses with its kinetic visual approach, but it's the affecting story and soulful performances that truly linger". On the ranking aggregator website
TSPDT the film is ranked 431st in their ranking of
1000 Greatest Films. Upon its release, the film attracted mostly positive reviews from Anglophone film critics.
Gene Moskowitz of
Variety called it "visually resplendent" and "youthfully excessive, but filmically beguiling film in spite of its way out techniques",
Roger Ebert, reviewing the film for
Chicago Sun-Times in 1978 following Parajanov's imprisonment in Siberian
GULAG labor camps in the 1970s, called it "one of the most unusual films I’ve seen, a barrage of images, music and noises, shot with such an active camera we almost need seatbelts" and compared Parajanov's work to "some of the early work of
Martin Scorsese".
Stephen Holden of
The New York Times, called it an "eruptively colourful movie", "charged with fantastical imagery", a "surreal folk fable strewn with larger-than-life characters whose faces and body language speak more eloquently than any words".
Edward Guthmann of
San Francisco Chronicle described the film as "one of those rare films that look totally fresh and uncorrupted – as if the director hadn't pilfered a thing from other film makers but had simply discovered the camera, and how best to use it, by himself".
David Parkinson of
Empire praised the film, calling it "a cinematic masterpiece, deconstructing the cinematic form and message and blowing the audience away with its multi-layered imagery […] pure genius"; and in his book
History of Film, Parkinson further expanded on his reception of the film by calling it "an audacious assault on the conventions of narrative and visual representation" that sought to "redefine the relationship between causal logic and screen space, and thus challenge accepted theories of audience perception" which managed to, paradoxically, "juxtapose subjective and objective viewpoints and use angular distortions, intricate (and seemingly impossible) camera movements, 'rack focus', telephoto-zoom and fish-eye lenses, and what [Paradjanov] termed a 'dramaturgy of colour' to recount his tale of doomed love".
Jonathan Rosenbaum of
Chicago Reader noted that it was an "extraordinary merging of myth, history, poetry, ethnography, dance, and ritual".
Dave Kehr of
The New York Times, described it as a "lyrical, unruly film" that "experiments with a nonrealistic use of color and some of the most free-spirited camerawork seen in a Ukrainian film since the pioneering work of [O]leksandr Dovzhenko", while
James Hoberman of
The Village Voice, praised it as an "overwhelmingly beautiful movie" where "a sad, short, brutalised life is elevated to ecstatic myth".
John Patterson of
LA Weekly called it a "startling combination of ethnography, [...] folk-myth and fairy-tale logic that sears the retina with its beauty, energy and ceaselessly inventive filmmaking." However, reviews from Ukrainian film critics upon its release were mostly mixed. Y. Boboshko and M. Maslovs'kyi, writing for
Soviet Culture in November 1964, criticised the film's departure from socialist realism, and through a humorous poem, emphasised that instead of tales of "shadows of ancestors", the authors should be creating stories about "contemporaneity". S. Zinych and N. Kapel'horods'ka, writing for
Folk Art in October 1965, emphasised the importance of the literary 'source material' for the film and highlighted the fact that the film was produced to commemorate the 100th anniversary of
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's birthday – the author of the eponymous novel
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors that served as the basis for film's plot; they also emphasised that Parajanov's film managed to masterfully re-create the cultural unicity of western Ukraine's peasants, particularly praising film composer
Myroslav Skoryk's fitting choice of Ukrainian folks songs/music as well as cinematographer
Yuri Ilyenko's and production designer 's appropriate choice of aesthetics that accurately depicted Ukrainian hutsul peasants's customs, traditions and beliefs.
Ivan Drach, whose review of the film was printed in 1969 book
Film Directors and Films of Ukrainian Modern Cinema: Artistic Portraits, emphasised that what makes
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors so powerful is film's use of authentic Ukrainian dialogues in the form of the Hutsul Ukrainian accent as well as its use of Ukrainian ethnographic material. Larysa Pohribna, in her 1971 book ''Kotsiubynsky's Works on Screen'', spoke negatively about the film and highlighted that Parajanov's
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors failed to live-up to the Kotsiubynsky's literary source material, and concluded that "servile copying of the literary source material leads only to the creation of weak films". Given that Parajanov's film drastically departed from the officially 'approved'
socialist realism artistic style of the time, it is surprising that Ukrainian film critics were not louder in their reproachment of
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors as they would have expected to be. This could be partially due to
Ukrainophilic tendencies of the-then head of
UkrSSR Petro Shelest who served as a 'patron-protector' of sorts to Parajanov, and Shelest's son Vitaliy later stated in his memoirs that "Paradjanov essentially was being protected [by his father, i.e., Petro Shelest]; practically the same day that father left [the post of the head of UkrSSR] – Parajanov got arrested".
Awards and notable film festival screenings The film began its international film festival tour in Spring 1965 and was warmly received by the film festival crowd. •
Grand Jury Award: Southern Cross for Best Production and ''Critics' Grand Prize – Mention for Colour Photography, Special Effects and Film Scenography'' –
Mar del Plata International Film Festival (March 1965) •
Non-competition screening –
San Sebastian Film Festival (June 1965) •
Non-competition commercial section screening –
Venice Film Festival (August 1965) •
Italian Tourist Office Award – Rome Film Festival (October 1965) •
Non-competition screening – Montreal Film Festival (July 1966) •
Non-competition screening –
Locarno Film Festival (July 1966) •
Non-competition screening –
New York Film Festival (September 1966) •
Golden Medal for Best Director –
Thessaloniki Film Festival (September 1966) •
Non-competition screening –
BFI London Film Festival's Festival of Festivals (December 1966) •
Non-competition screening –
Melbourne International Film Festival (June 1967; again in 2019 as a part of a retrospective) •
Shevchenko National Prize in Cinematography (1988/1991) ==Legacy==