Despite having studied film at the VGIK, Parajanov discovered his artistic path only after seeing Andrei Tarkovsky's dreamlike first film "Ivan's Childhood". Parajanov was highly appreciated by Tarkovsky himself in "Voyage in Time" ("Always with huge gratitude and pleasure I remember the films of Sergei Parajanov which I love very much. His way of thinking, his paradoxical, poetical... ability to love the beauty and the ability to be absolutely free within his own vision"), and Michelangelo Antonioni, Francis Ford Coppola, Jean-Luc Godard ("In the temple of cinema, there are images, light, and reality. Sergei Parajanov was the master of that temple"), Martin Scorsese, Mikhail Vartanov ("Probably, besides the film language suggested by Griffith and Eisenstein, the world cinema has not discovered anything revolutionary new until Paradjanov's "Color of Pomegranates""), Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Giulietta Masina, Francesco Rosi, Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marcello Mastroianni.