You Are Fire: A Live Performance of Sayat Nova Outtakes

You Are Fire: A Live Performance of Sayat Nova Outtakes 
January 16, 2026 | 8:00 PM – 9:40 PM | Friday
January 17, 2026 | 5:00 PM – 6:40 PM | Saturday

You Are Fire is a collaborative project envisioned by Elvin Brandhi and Daniel Bird.

This live film-performance reworks newly scanned 35mm outtakes and screen tests from the shooting of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates or Sayat Nova (1969) into 15 film miniatures. Originally conceived as a film-poem about the life of the poet-ashugh, Arutin Sayadyan, each miniature grows out of textures – Armenian, Georgian and Azeri architecture, landscapes and objects – enabling the authenticity of an era to emerge. Using Tigran Mansurian and Yuri Sayadian’s original soundtrack as raw material, the musical heritage of Sayat Nova is brought to the fore, reimagining a performance by an ashugh, or singer-poet bard, at the early 21st-century crossroads of analogue and digital media.

Reconciling West and East, You Are Fire explores Armenia as Europe’s avant-garde in Asia. The performance project is developed from the installation Temple of Cinema #1: Sayat Nova Outtakes. In 2019, it opened Art Directions at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Originally a collaboration between the Armenian Cinema Foundation in Yerevan and Fixafilm in Poland, it formed part of a restoration programme, the Hamo Bek-Nazarov Project, encompassing archives and institutions from the South Caucasus, Central Asia and Ukraine.

Working with both archival footage and audio samples, Brandhi and Bird subject the working materials of The Colour of Pomegranates to decollage and collage, resulting in a profane, live, shadow-film, where the subconscious is brought to the fore, along with all that was repressed or denied, not just by the Soviet censor, but Parajanov himself.

You Are Fire – Research, Practice and Process
Saturday, 17 January 2026, 2 – 3 pm | Oldham Theatre

In 2018, Daniel Bird began work on a project involving the scanning, cataloguing and studying of approximately one hundred cans of film held by the National Archives of Armenia, featuring outtakes, screen and camera tests from Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1969). Through this process, You Are Fire: A Live Performance of Sayat Nova Outtakes was created, a live audio-visual performance that breathes new life into the rediscovered material.

Daniel Bird, the guest curator of the Retrospective: Sergei Parajanov at the Asian Film Archive, will share more about his research journey, creative process, and vision behind this unique work. Discover how film fragments, readings, and archival documents from film scripts and telegrams are combined to present this work that reimagines Parajanov’s iconic The Colour of Pomegranates.