Sergei Parajanov is a filmmaking superstar most of today’s moviegoers have never heard of. And yet the late director (1924-1990) is hailed by fellow cineastes, critics and historians as one of the greatest film artists who ever lived.  Joseph Stalin and the other 20th century Soviet apparatchiks made it their mission to keep Parajanov’s work obscure, but the ethnic-Armenian native of Tiflis, Georgia, was so obsessed with his visions, nothing—not even three prison sentences—could dissuade him. To the official censors Parajanov, with his anti-realistic spectacles and unconventional lifestyle (he was bisexual), was the antithesis of the approved “revolutionary” artist. As glimpsed in his most glorious creations, Parajanov’s excursions into the Georgian, Armenian and Ukrainian cultures invoke the soul of the mountainous, rebellious Caucasus region—where Eastern Europe meets Western Asia—in lyrical, deliriously colorful terms. In his day, Parajanov’s dreamscapes enchanted audiences lucky enough to see them onscreen but terrified the political establishment. He was a maverick with an eye for beauty. What better recommendation could a director have for restless modern film fanatics?  With its retrospective series “Sergei Parajanov: Centennial Celebration,” the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive presents four of the director’s best-known features, a selection of shorts, and a rewarding documentary profile, Sergei Parajanov: The Rebel, by French filmmaker Patrick Cazals (2003). Three weeks of cinematic rapture, now through Nov. 22.  Parajanov’s break-through feature Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors is equal parts ethnographic “doctored doc” and expressionistic fever dream. Produced in 1965 on location in snowy Carpathian mountain villages, it retells the Ukrainian legend of tragic lovers Ivan (Ivan Mikolaychuk) and Marichka (Larisa Kadochnikova) and their Romeo-and-Juliet-style relationship. Amid a seductive whirlwind of stylized tableaux, Parajanov puts his film-school studies with famed auteur Alexander Dovzhenko to work in a rustic setting garnished with non-stop religious imagery. Is this truly primitive? Or an avant-garde rethinking of a folkloric fable? Parajanov’s use of subjective symbolism and metaphor is drastically different than the state-favored social realism of the day, which may explain the cool reception Shadows received from Moscow. Nevertheless, the story leaps from the screen as an unforgettable hymn to the Ukrainian people. It plays Nov. 15.  Parajanov’s life and career flowered in a multicultural region that fostered political and religious strife, but also an intense outpouring of artistic energy. For a non-conformist familiar with the Armenian, Georgian, Ukrainian and Russian cultures, as well as those of Türkiye and Iran, the late-period Soviet Union offered a thousand vivid ways to express oneself—and a thousand ways to get into trouble with his USSR masters.  The Color of Pomegranates (1969), originally titled Sayat Nova, evokes the spirit of the title poet/monk, in the director’s words, through “the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments, in the manner of medieval Armenian troubadours.” Parajanov employs enough Christian symbolism to populate a dozen Cecil B. DeMille epics, but with fixed camera and lush montage. When Soviet censors complained they didn’t understand it, Parajanov replied he didn’t either. Worried about minority nationalistic rumbling, Moscow changed the title. No matter. Pomegranates is the film that established him as his era’s leading screen visionary. It screens Nov. 1. Legend of Suram Fortress (1985), the most conventionally beautiful of Parajanov’s tone poems, tells of a Georgian warrior who entombs himself alive in the fortress’s wall. As usual in folklore from the Eurasian steppes, a flavor of cruelty lingers just below the surface, while bizarre costumes and ceremonies alternate with scenes of splendiferous natural scenery. Nov. 17. As an extra bonus, BAMPFA is hosting a Sergei Parajanov Symposium on Saturday, Nov. 2 (2:30-5:30pm). Co-sponsored by the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, alongside the Berkeley Armenian Studies Program and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, a panel of five academic experts gets to the bottom of Parajanov’s life story and its significance in world culture. For more info, visit: bampfa.org.  * * * Nov. 1-22 at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive