During the 10th edition of Animaphix, the festival will dedicate a special retrospective to Theodore Ushev, who will be awarded the Guttuso Prize 2024 for his vast production of films made with the technique of painting in motion. With his constant search for new forms of expression and curiosity about every aspect of the world, the Bulgarian-Canadian director has established himself as one of the leading figures of 21st-century animation cinema.
The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of his work and the innovations that have marked his career, including almost all the films he has made over a quarter of a century, from Tower Bawher (2005), a frantic run through Russian constructivism to the music of Georgy Sviridov, from which some characteristics of Théodore’s art can already be deduced, in particular his privileged relationship with music, as in the following Drux Flux (2008), to music by Alexandre Mossolov, a short film inspired by philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, partly figurative and partly abstract, in which the director deconstructs industrial scenes to reveal the inhumanity of progress, and Gloria Victoria (2012) inspired by the Leningrad Symphony (no. 7) by Dimitri Shostakovich, in which a kind of conflicting admiration for constructivist aesthetics continues and deepens, giving rise to a veritable trilogy on the relationship between art and power. Music dominates in Sonámbulo (2015), an independent short film inspired by the poem Romance Sonambulo by Federico Garcia Lorca, which depicts a surrealist journey of shapes and colours on a frenetic track by the Bulgarian musician Kottarashky, already the author of the soundtrack for Demons (2012), a succession of scenes of Eastern European folk art flowing on a vinyl record. Even more structured and complex are the pseudo-documentary Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett Diaries) (2012), an account of the life of the unfortunate Canadian artist Arthur Lipsett, through the discovery of his diaries, and the more recent Physique de la Tristesse (The Physics of Sorrow) (2019), based on the novel by Georgi Gospodinov, which was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film and is considered one of the high points of Ushev’s career. This monumental film reconstructs the protagonist’s life as a labyrinth, wandering through the past to find the sad child at the centre of it.
In addition, the VR version of Vaysha l’Aveugle (Blind Vaysha) (2016), based on a text by Georgi Gospodinov, the story of a girl who sees the past with her left eye and the future with her right one, and is, therefore, unable to live in the present, will be presented. Viewers will enjoy this immersive experience through the visors in the Festival’s VR Zone, choosing to see the past or the future, with different endings to the film.
