Sergei Iosifovich Parajanov was an Armenian film director and screenwriter. Parajanov is regarded by film critics, film historians and filmmakers to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in cinema history.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, alternatively translated into English as Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors or Shadows of Our Ancestors, also known in English under the alternative title Wild Horses of Fire and under the mistaken title of In the Shadow of the Past, is a 1965 Soviet-era Ukrainian film by the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov based on the 1911 novel Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky that tells a "Romeo and Juliet tale" of young Ukrainian Hutsul lovers trapped on opposite sides of a Carpathian family blood feud.