By the 14th century, the Byzantine Empire was, if not on the verge of actual collapse, at least seriously decadent and clearly on its last legs. The hungry wolves of Europe were preparing to dine on its corpse, and as a result the Byzantine army and its allies were constantly engaged in battles and skirmishes. In this story, a widow lives in the 14th-century Byzantine village of Doxobus with her son Xenos. She forms a relationship with a village elder, and when she gives birth to the elder’s son, her son from her previous marriage is sent to live in a monastery.

Sergei Paradjanov, the great Soviet filmmaker of Armenian origin who was born and grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, studied film in Moscow and worked for many years in Ukraine, talks on camera to Fotos Lamprinos about his life, his films, and events in the USSR under Gorbachev’s Perestroika, a few short months before he died and while the state of his health was already deteriorating. The film includes rare footage of the massacre of Georgian civilians by the Soviet Army in April 1989 and unpublished material from the Ukrainian prison in which Paradjanov served his sentence.