In November of 2025, we put on our first-ever collaborative scented film showing with PAMCut Tomorrow Theater and Moth & Rabbit Parfums. Together we chose to begin our collaborative efforts with one of Moth & Rabbits newer releases, and a screening the film it was named after The Color of Pomegranates, for its stunning visual style and dynamic fragrant accompaniment. Of course, all of the offerings from Moth & Rabbit, and their film inspirations, are intricate, beautiful, and resonant, but we felt the extremely limited dialogue and rich visual environments of the film made for the perfect introductory event. After, selling the entire theater out, and hearing from a great many folks who would have also joined had there been more seats, we promptly went to work setting up another collaboration. We are happy to share that our second scented screening with PAMCut, the Academy Award Best Picture winning film Parasite, is already nearly half sold out! If you’re interested to join, now would be a great time to grab a ticket by clicking here!
As we are preparing for this next screening, we realized the excellent pieces of writing offered to us by Moth & Rabbit Creative Director Elke Filpes would be an excellent and entertaining thing to share with our online community and those who could not attend the event! Below, you will find the timestamps and descriptions of the scenes The Colour of Pomegranate was expertly built by master perfumer Mark Buxton to evolve alongside. These descriptions were handed out to every attendee of our first scented film screening, and we intend to share the scene descriptions we build into flyers for our next showing as well. We hope you’ll enjoy these alongside a scented experience with this special fragrance.
a) first sequence 00:10:04-00:19:34
Extended Synopsis — The Cleansing and Anointing Sequence in The Colour of Pomegranates
As the poet prepares to renounce the world and enter the monastery, Parajanov presents a solemn and dreamlike ritual of purification, composed in a series of static, painterly tableaux.
The sequence begins with the washing and soaping of the poet’s body. Attendants, dressed in austere garments, methodically soap and rinse him, their movements slow and ceremonial. The water, opaque and heavy with symbolic weight, becomes a medium of erasure — cleansing not only the body but also the memories and passions of his former life as a poet and lover. The sound of dripping water replaces speech, and the gestures are those of both tenderness and spiritual severity.
After the washing, a striking image follows: monks covered in blackened oil or soot, standing or kneeling as streams of oil rain down upon them. Their forms glisten, half human, half sculptural, as the oil transforms the dirt into a kind of dark blessing. This “oil rain” functions as a paradoxical anointing — a ritual of consecration through impurity, suggesting that holiness must pass through the experience of corruption and materiality. The monks, drenched and motionless, embody the tension between flesh and spirit that runs throughout the film.
Intercut with this are images of female bodies and royal figures that act as symbolic counterpoints to the ascetic purification. A woman’s body, adorned with a shell, evokes fertility, birth, and sensual memory — reminders of the earthly beauty the poet is leaving behind. The queen draped in white silk, holding or associated with a white rose, appears as an apparition of purity and idealized love, both sacred and unattainable. Her stillness mirrors that of the poet, yet she belongs to the realm of vision and dream, not the monastery’s silence.
Together, these images form a spiritual dialectic: soap and water erase, oil sanctifies, the shell and silk recall the world’s beauty, and the rose signifies purity transformed by sacrifice. The entire passage operates outside of linear time — as if the poet’s soul is being washed, anointed, and stripped in preparation for its final metamorphosis into silence, devotion, and death.
b) second sequence 00:54:48-01:06:32
After his ritual cleansing, Sayat-Nova enters the monastery — a world of silence, stone, and contemplation. Here, time seems to fold in on itself. Parajanov composes the scene not as a linear event but as a vision of memory communing with its own echo.
In one of the most haunting tableaux, the monk encounters his younger self. The two figures — one in the black habit of renunciation, the other in bright garments recalling his youth — sit across from each other in stillness, as if facing the mirror of their own soul. Between them lies a loaf of bread, the simplest yet most sacred of offerings. The act of breaking and sharing the bread unfolds slowly, without words, as a ritual of remembrance. It is a gesture of reconciliation: the monk forgiving the poet, the artist offering sustenance to his future ascetic self.
This image of shared bread carries deep resonance — at once Eucharistic and personal. It recalls the communion of the sacred meal, but also the daily ritual of sustenance in the monastic life. The camera lingers on their hands, the rough texture of the bread, the stillness that surrounds them.
After this, Parajanov shifts the tone toward mourning and humility. The monk (the older self) is shown weeping over a wooden object — sometimes read as a coffin, a prayer stool, or a relic chest. His tears fall silently, absorbed by the grain of the wood. It is as if he is grieving for his own past, for the world of passion and poetry he has surrendered. The wood, austere and tactile, becomes a vessel for memory and repentance.
This moment of weeping is both personal and liturgical: an act of penitential sorrow and artistic mourning. Parajanov frames it with icon-like precision — the monk bowed, light grazing the wood, the background still and timeless. The silence is filled with the echo of his former life, with verses that can no longer be spoken.
The Vision of the Queen with White Flowers
After the silent communion with his younger self — after the sharing of bread and the tears upon wood — Sayat-Nova enters a phase of inward stillness. His days in the monastery unfold in the half-light of cell and chapel, the air dense with incense smoke and the faint rustle of monastic garments. It is within this atmosphere of prayer and solitude that the Queen appears once more — not as a figure of worldly power, but as an apparition of purity, memory, and transcendence.
She emerges through the smoke, her presence half-real, half-visionary. Her hair is crowned with white flowers, fragile and luminous against the subdued tones of the monastery. Each petal seems to hold a glimmer of the poet’s past desires, now transfigured into sacred light. She wears a robe of pale silk that drapes in sculptural folds, echoing the vestments of saints in Armenian icons. Her movements are measured and ceremonial; she does not walk so much as glide through the frame.
The monks continue their incense ritual in the background, their censers swinging, the bells faintly chiming. The smoke swirls around the Queen until her figure becomes part of it — her outline softening, her form dissolving into fragrance. She holds or touches white flowers in a gesture that blends benediction and farewell, and for a moment the poet’s gaze meets hers. The silence between them carries the full weight of his renunciation and her forgiveness: the union of earthly love and divine purity.
The Queen’s face remains calm, almost icon-like. When she raises her hands, it is as though she blesses both the poet and his suffering. The white flowers tremble slightly, scattering petals — a fleeting image of beauty’s mortality. Then, slowly, she begins to fade, absorbed into the whiteness of the smoke and light, leaving only the echo of her presence — a faint shimmer, a trace of perfume, a memory that has become prayer.
After her disappearance, Sayat-Nova remains motionless, surrounded by incense and silence. The Queen’s vision seals his transformation: what was once passion becomes devotion, and what was once the poet’s muse now appears as the divine feminine principle — the eternal inspiration that survives beyond flesh and memory.
In Parajanov’s symbolic language, the Queen with the white flowers is the final embodiment of the poet’s art and longing, purified by the rituals of the monastery. Her whiteness unites all previous images — linen, water, rose, smoke — into a single, transcendent moment where love, purity, and poetry become indistinguishable.
Explore The Colour of Pomegranate here
Explore Moth & Rabbit here
Grab your tickets for Parasite in Smell-o-Vision here
Explore Parasite the fragrance here
Explore Moth & Rabbit’s newest release, Challengers, here
