A young student from Besançon, born in Ukraine, seizes his camera to make short films committed to the conflict that is setting fire to his native land.
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It’s a harmless-looking short film: two white mice move about in a dump and try to fight for their survival. House of Mice tells a very current story, that of the war in Ukraine. Rodents become a metaphor for civilian populations fleeing Russian bombardments and their destroyed city.
Behind the camera is a budding filmmaker. Erik Sémashkin, a young film student from Besançon born in Odessa and arrived in France at the age of eight.
Through this short film, imagined before the start of the war, he wanted to express the life of Ukrainians in the face of tensions with the Kremlin. “I still have family there and it’s all this pressure that I wanted to express. It was during the editing that I discovered that the conflict had really started. Maybe that’s where I gave an even darker dimension”, explains Erik Semashkin.
After the release of House of Micethe young student goes further by realizing plastic soldier a few weeks ago. A more ambitious project of about ten minutes on the meeting of a young Serb ready to enlist in the army in Belgrade, scarred by the 1999 NATO bombings in the Kosovo conflict. But the meeting, on his way, of an international troupe of actors, will make him radically change his mind.
The short film has already won a springboard organized by a school of cultural mediation. An accomplishment for the young filmmaker who discovered the seventh art as a child by doing stop-motion with legos, before taking the next step: making his own subjects.