LEGENDЕ

A Play by Kirill Serebrennikov
Inspired by the World of Sergey Paradjanov

 
LEGENDE is not a conventional biography of the visionary filmmaker Sergey Paradjanov. Inspired by his artistic universe, Kirill Serebrennikov creates a poetic stage journey through a world where memory, imagination, dreams, and reality intertwine.

Paradjanov appears here as a poet, a visionary, a wanderer, and a rebel—a figure whose imagination transcends time and borders. Combining theater, music, painting, literature, and cinema, LEGENDE creates a vibrant world where beauty becomes an act of resistance. The performance concludes with these words: 

"After us, only the beauty we allowed ourselves remains. I allowed myself a great deal of beauty—a very great deal. And that is good." 

LEGENDE is a meditation on freedom, creativity, and the power of art, weaving together timeless stories about the struggle to remain human and the triumph of life over death.  

KIRILL SEREBRENNIKOV ON SERGEY PARADJANOV:

"Paradjanov is an artist and poet who thinks and speaks to the audience, not in the usual narrative way, but through images. These images are always vivid, emotional, meaningful, and paradoxical. In some ways, this is the height of visual cinema; an explosion of color, an explosion of fantasy, an explosion of images that burns itself into our memories forever.

Sadly, the list of Paradjanov’s films that he was not able to make exceeds the list of the works that he managed to create. Over time, a devoted community of fans and connoisseurs of Sergey Paradjanov has gradually gathered fragments of Paradjanov’s world: collages, apocrypha, aphorisms and anecdotes, drawings, and letters.

He was free in a place where no freedom seemed possible. He allowed himself what others could not even imagine. 

I watched his films countless times in my youth, and they became part of my identity. It pains me when people do not know of the existence of this artist."