Special Screening
Shemyakin: A Film Spanning 36 Years
134 min | Documentary | 2026 | Russia | Russian | English Subs
Schedule
Details coming soon
Synopsis:
Filmed over 36 years, Shemyakin: A Film Spanning 36 Years is an intimate portrait of Mikhail Shemyakin, one of the most distinctive figures to emerge from the unofficial Soviet art scene.
The film begins in Los Angeles in 1991, on the eve of the Academy Awards, and follows Shemyakin across decades, continents, and radically changing political realities. Through his memories, archival footage, photographs, and encounters with artists and cultural figures, we return to his childhood, postwar Leningrad, the persecution that drove him into exile, and his first years in Paris with almost nothing.
In the West, Shemyakin builds an extraordinary artistic universe of painting, sculpture, theater, opera, ballet, and carnivals. His friendships with Vladimir Vysotsky and Joseph Brodsky illuminate a generation of Russian artists for whom artistic freedom was inseparable from personal freedom.
Years later, the exile returns to Russia as a celebrated artist. The film asks what happens when the country that once rejected an artist begins to claim him as its own.
Director
Anatoly Balchev
Started his work as a composer. Balchev composed themes for a number of films and stage plays, Russian pop stars perform his songs, and he also released albums of his own songs.
As a director he debuted by staging on the Central Art Workers House studio a self-written play "The Poets' Cafe" in 1990. In the 90s he became one of the producers of a Russian-American project "Cops in Russia", another popular version of a TV show "Cops" by "Fox Television" company. In 2002, he founded an "Apollo Film production". Its first project was a documentary film about the Life and art work of Mikhail Chemyakin, a prominent Russian artist, who currently resides in the USA. His next project was a film about the great Russian sportsman Ivan Yarygin. The documentary produced by the studio "The Olympic heat. Athens." dedicated to the 2004 Olympics in Athens has won numerous awards at international sports film festivals.