Erik Semashkin arrived in France from Ukraine in 2012. What he brought with him, besides a suitcase, was an eye for the world’s contradictions and a restless need to put them on screen. Since then he’s made over twenty short films, racking up an almost absurd number of festival selections across five continents: Paris, New York, Seoul, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Kraków, London, and well beyond. At some point it stopped being impressive and started being simply who he is. His films don’t sit still. One deals with environmental collapse, the next with war, the next with something stranger and harder to name. What ties them together isn’t genre or style, it’s an alertness to the world as it actually is, right now, in all its mess and urgency. He doesn’t look away, but he also doesn’t preach. He tells stories.
At Kinomural, he’s showing Inside You, and if that title makes you a little uncomfortable, good. That’s probably the point.
A grape is eaten. What follows is a long, perilous, and deeply unglamorous journey through the human body. Inside You takes us exactly where we’d rather not go: into the flesh, the organs, the wet machinery of digestion that keeps us alive whether we appreciate it or not. Nobody talks about inner beauty here. Nobody talks about beauty at all. What Erik Semashkin offers instead is something rarer and more honest: a face-to-face encounter with the irreducible ugliness we all share, the system quietly doing its thankless work somewhere beneath our clothes and our self-image. The body is a machine. It needs feeding. And in a world drowning in junk food, that machine is taking a beating. Inside You doesn’t let you look away. It puts you right up close, grape and all, and asks you to sit with what you see.
Difficult to digest? A little. Worth it? Absolutely.
