Estranged from her emotionally distant husband, Palahna becomes involved with a local molfar Yurko, while Ivan begins to experience hallucinations.
As reality merges into dream, the colourless shade of Marichka reaches out across a great space and touches Ivan's outstretched hand.
[10] The partial records gathered by Ukrainian film historians reveal that the cabinet ministers of UkrSSR in May 1966 issued a strongly worded reproachment to Parajanov for "exceeding the budget of Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by 97 thousand rubles".
Originally, Parajanov planned to cast a rising-star and box-office magnet Russian actor Genadi Yukhtin to play the main protagonist Ivan, but under the recommendation of filmmaker Viktor Ivchenko, along with comments from the film's cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko, that "Yukhtin just did not fit the part and when [during the try-outs] he dressed in the Ukrainian hutsul garments, it wasn't a fit for him", Parajanov later changed his decision, and cast a Ukrainian actor Ivan Mykolaichuk instead.
[6] The film features leitmotifs that relate to each of the main characters, as well as to the spirit of the Ukrainian West (the hutsul region in the Carpathian mountains).
Another one of Skoryk's musical pieces in the film was his composition for the symphony orchestra Hutsul Triptych (Ukrainian: Гуцульський триптих, romanized: Hutsulskyi tryptykh).
[48] A part of this program consisted of a special seminar dedicated to the works of Parajanov and was aimed at showing support for his illegal imprisonment on trumped-up charges of homosexuality.
[57][58][6] This Kyiv premiere drew a significant political protest due to the growing imprisonment and oppression of Ukrainian intellectuals by the Soviet regime.
[75] This 2015 fully restored version was commissioned in July 2015 by the Ukrainian State Film Agency (in association with the Dovzhenko Centre[76]) and the Ukraine's Ministry of Culture.
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.
[24] 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".
[99] 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".
[100][101] Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader noted that it was an "extraordinary merging of myth, history, poetry, ethnography, dance, and ritual".
[102] 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".
[103][104] 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.
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".
Instead, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is highly symbolic, making frequent use of Ukrainian religious and folkloric images that included crosses, lambs, graves, and spirits.