Mikhail Vartanov

Member of the jury at the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival responsible for presenting Spain's first annual Jean Vigo Award. [February 2007]

1st public appearance in almost a decade at the American Film Institute's Exhibition of Russian Cinema in Hollywood; Mikhail Vartanov, Martin Vartanov, William Friedkin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Peter Bogdanovich presented "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," "Ivan The Terrible," "Battleship Potemkin" and "The Ballad of a Soldier" respectively. [April 2003]

Best friend of the legendary Sergei Parajanov who considered Mikhail Vartanov to be the only authentic expert of his art and who was one of only a handful of Paradjanov's (many) friends to passionately campaign for his release from the Soviet prisons - their brave prison correspondence later became a chapter of Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992).

In the war-torn and blockaded Armenia of the early 1990s, which was plagued by severe shortages of food, water, transportation and electricity, Vartanov's health, already compromised by decades of harassment, worsened. Despite the serious limitations, he persisted and, for the first time, independently produced what became his final film.

When Vartanov's artistic freedom was restored 20 years later, he responded with Minas: A Requiem (1989) and Parajanov: The Last Spring (1992) - his masterpiece, which was admired by some of cinema's most important luminaries, including Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. For bravely campaigning for the release of the imprisoned Parajanov, Vartanov was fired from the Soviet Armenia's sole film studio and deprived of his only source of income (the film industry, like all others, was fully government funded and controlled). Parajanov reacted with a letter written to Vartanov from the Ukrainian prison, "You and your purity are colliding with circumstances and predators". Thanks to the tireless petitioning of his (V. G. I. K.

His fierce Erased Faces (1987) terrified the colleagues who doubted the permanence of the Gorbachev reforms.

The publication of his revered Unmailed Letters essays in the top literary magazines, spurred new writings, as well as their translations all over Europe, notably in Cahiers du Cinema in 1986.

Not until Paradjanov was taken off the blacklist in 1984 (due to lobbying by celebrities) was Vartanov also permitted to direct.

Even though these were studio-imposed films, such as Roots (1984), he breathed into them his trademark soulfulness.

) classmate Artavazd Peleshian and Gennadi Melkonian, Vartanov was able to work as their cinematographer and exquisitely lensed two films that became classics: Seasons (1975) and Mulberry (1979).

Cinematographer of the Year at the Sixth Annual USSR Film Festival (1973); Vartanov received the award for "Song of Eternity" a film he disliked. USSR Film Festival was inaugurated in 1968 and each year was held in a different Soviet capital.

Vartanov was blacklisted for his debut film, The Color of Land (1969), where he portrayed his dissident friends Parajanov (imprisoned in 1974) and Minas (assassinated in 1975).

King of Norway, Harald the Fifth, and Vartanov were born on the same day, February 21, 1937; King had a son and a daughter and Vartanov had a son and a daughter.

Graduate of the world's oldest film school VGIK in Moscow, Russia, where his teachers were Anatoli Golovnya (cinematographer of Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1926 classic "Mother") and Boris Volchek (cinematographer of Mikhail Romm's 1937 classic "Lenin in October").

Attended the ceremony of the unveiling of the monument on the shooting site of D.W. Griffith's silent film "In Old California" (1910) - the first movie made in Hollywood. [May 2004]