Andrey Shemyakin, film critic and documentary director, died

In Moscow, a Russian film critic, author and presenter of a television program about documentary cinema, director Andrey Shemyakin, died. He was 68 years old.

The farewell will be held on December 1 at the Moscow Cinema House, the press service of the Union of Cinematographers of Russia reported.

“A man worth his weight in gold. An intellectual and an intellectual, a man of encyclopedic knowledge and some truly painful love not only for cinema, but also for culture in general,” wrote film critic and journalist Ekaterina Barabash on the death of a colleague on Facebook.

Andrey Shemyakin was born on January 12, 1955 in Vilnius. He graduated from Moscow State University’s Department of Philology, studied at the graduate school of the Institute of World Literature named after A.M. Gorky RAS (IMLY). In 1989, Shemyakin moved to the Research Institute of Cinematography. In the 1990s, he worked on television, leading documentary projects on the “Kultura” TV channel. Since 2003, he has been the author and presenter of the “Documentary Camera” program. From December 2012 to June 2015, Shemyakin held the position of president of the Guild of Cinematographers and Film Critics of Russia, and until 2023 he was its vice-president.

“Here is a man for whom no one will remember a single conforming or self-interested concession… He never conceded anything. He never betrayed anything and never denied anyone. He saw the complexity of the world and did not recognize the simplified one,” writes writer Dmitry Bykov about Andrey Shemyakina.

Shemyakin is the author of more than a thousand publications in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. He was a guest of Radio Svoboda broadcasts many times.