Bulgarian- born Montreal animator, Théodore Ushev is an anima-tion anomaly. His fi lms, steeped in old- world ideas, are fi ltered through modern technologies that enable him to convey his thoughts fast. Animators have a tendency to take anywhere from fi ve to ten years to make their precious fi lms. Th is makes it difficult to create art that speaks to the moment and that has, arguably, always been one of the drawbacks of animation:
it often lacks urgency and immediacy. An academic twit once called animation the “ceramics of cinema”. Harsh words that I don’t subscribe to, but I can understand why people think this way. Animators make precious, polished little fi lms that don’t seem to have much impact on the world. Th éodore’s handling of animation, however, is raw, rough and chaotic; there’s nothing polished, pristine or precious about his approach. His best fi lms (Tower Bawher and Drux Flux) were made, incredibly, in just three weeks. Ushev can’t help it — he has a burning passion and desire to communicate. His work, which hardly ever looks the same, is a quest to uncover chaos of his moment — and ours.
Ironically, unlike so many indie animators, Ushev always wanted to be an animator, but animation didn’t always want him.
Ushev, the son of a journalist and an abstract painter, developed
an interest in animation in high school and even made a short fi lm before graduating. Ushev wanted to study animation at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofi a; however, the academy had an abundance of animation students and so, for a couple of years, was not accepting new applicants. Instead, Ushev did his mandatory two- year military service while he worked as a mural artist. After doing his time, he returned to the Academy and enrolled in graphic and poster design.
During his studies (he graduated with his master’s degree in 1995), Ushev did various freelance jobs on the side. One of his designs won a CorelDRAW design contest for computer graphic and design. “Th is was the golden age of Corel Corporation,” says Ushev. “Th ey invited me to Ottawa for the award ceremony and covered all my expenses.” Ushev won two more Corel awards and during the third visit, an immigration offi cer asked him if he wanted a permanent residence visa. “I said, why not,” recalls Ushev. I packed my bag and came to visit some animation friends in Montreal. It was the golden age of multimedia in Montreal.
I found a job as an art director in one of those ‘new’ dot- com companies, where they where giving free bagels and bananas to the staff , and recreational massages in the lunchtime. It was a pretty good time to be a designer.”
Ushev’s work often required him to design interactive and multimedia websites for fashion companies in Montreal. Th is meant learning the new Adobe Flash software. Discovering this software also led Ushev back to animation. Over time he became dissatisfi ed with his jobs, so to amuse himself he started making a short Flash animation fi lm. “Th ey gave me the freedom to do what I want,” recalls Ushev. “I didn’t care too much about the
results. Th ey didn’t cost much to do and I did them in my free time.”
During this period, Ushev made a number of interesting Flash fi lms, including Dissociation (2001), about a man stuck in a dead- end offi ce job and dreams of love and freedom; Early in Fall, Late in Winter (2002), about the life and death of a romance;
Walking On By (2003), where a stick fi gure walks along a line and encounters all sorts of people and obstacles until he literally reaches the end of the line; Well- Tempered Heads (2003), featuring music by Bach where the piano keys turn into a rotating series of wood- carved heads that become increasingly splintered and pained.
Ushev’s early fi lms lack the sophistication and depth of his later work, but they are remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, while he does deal with potentially cliché subjects like doomed love, existentialism and the evils of power, Ushev manages to do so in a somewhat lighthearted manner. His characters take their pain: they absorb it and move on. Th ere’s no hysterics or wrist slitting. Pain and disappointment are natural parts of life.
Secondly, these fi lms were made in the early days of Flash anima-tion. With few exceptions (for example the online work of San Francisco’s Wild Brain Animation Studio and that of Canadian animator Ed Beals), Flash works of that period were fl accid and juvenile, littered with idiotic gags and goofy characters that would barely amuse a brain- damaged ten- year- old. Ushev’s inspired and deeply personal and mature narratives were akin to fi nding water in a desert.
Animation became more than a hobby for Ushev when Early Fall, Late Winter was accepted into competition in 2003 by the
Annecy, France, and Ottawa, Canada, festivals — the two largest animation festivals. At this time, producer Michael Fukushima at the legendary National Film Board of Canada (NFB) saw Ushev’s work and suggested he propose a fi lm to the studio. Ushev’s pro-posal for a fi lm based on a Franz Kafka story called Th e Man Who Waited was rejected, but he was off ered a chance to make a fi lm for the NFB’s Cineweb series, which was aimed at encouraging emerging animators to make low- budget internet fi lms.
Ushev’s contribution to Cineweb was the fi lm Vertical (2003), a simple but eff ective piece about the fall of society. Graphically infl uenced by Polish animator Jan Lenica’s push- pin graphics, Vertical shows men, birds, bottles, words and sanity sliding down into a perpetual cycle of ruin. Th e Nino Rota- infl uenced soundtrack that seems pinched from a merry- go- round captures the absurdity of the characters as they struggle to keep from fall-ing. Finally, the last shot ends where it began. Th ere is no end to the fall, the world just keeps going round and round as people continue to make the same irrational and selfi sh decisions.
Following Vertical, Ushev began work on his fi rst offi cial NFB fi lm, Tzaritza; however, he became increasingly frustrated with the fi lm and decided to take a break by making an entirely new fi lm: Tower Bawher. Made in just three weeks, this was a landmark fi lm for Ushev. His internet work had introduced him to the NFB, but Tower brought his name to festivals around the world, winning numerous prizes and acclaim.
Infl uenced by Russian constructivist artists like Dziga Vertov and the Stenberg brothers, and featuring the dynamic score Time, Forward! by Russian composer Georgy Sviridov — Canadian fi lmmaker Guy Maddin also used this score eff ectively in his
short fi lm Th e Heart of the World — a litany of lines, shapes, colors and sounds storm across and around the screen of Tower Bawher. Th ey go up, they go down; they come together and just as quickly fall apart. Tower Bawher is an intense existentialist fi lm about our often frustrating and restless drive to fi ght through the muddle and clutter of mediocrity and suppression in search of the stuff that makes us. In the end though, there is a paradox. No matter how far we climb or how much we seek, everything falls apart. Th ings come together, but only for a moment: that’s the route of the ride.
For the record, “Bawher” is a bit of a nonsense word. “Tower in Russian is Baschnia,” Ushev explains. “But because of the Cyrillic alphabet, a foreigner will read it like BAWHR, so Tower Bawher was perfect (Bauhaus, Bauer . . .).” Incredibly, Tower Bawher was made in just a few weeks. “I start doing it one night in April [2005]. I was in a deep depression. Tzaritza was not going well.” During a particularly restless night, Ushev woke up and remembered an idea he had to use Sviridov’s Time, Forward!
“For many years,” remembers Ushev, “this piece was the music for the evening news of the Soviet state TV. Th is program was broadcast every Friday.”
While the television hummed in the background, Ushev’s father would work on his own personal drawings and paint-ings, and also on more conventional propaganda posters that he made solely to earn a living. Th e memories of these Friday nights struck a chord with Ushev. “It was like an absurdist stage decoration. Before the news, there was usually a Russian children’s programme on. Typically it featured very, very slow Russian animations like Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog. I’d fall asleep
immediately. Th en, suddenly, I’d be awakened by the uplifting Sviridov music, with turning globes, and the lines of the dynamic building of Communism.”
And so it was during a sleepless night in April that Ushev decided to make the movie. Five weeks later the fi nished fi lm found its way to my desk. “I was not able to sleep during the entire process. It was like being in a trance, like I traveled back 30 years with a time machine. I didn’t think about festivals, or if the movie will be fi nished. I was just diving into my memories, like a ‘Cartesian theater’. It was like a letter. I was in a hurry to show it to my father, because I planned to make a short vacation in Bulgaria. It was done for him.”
Before Ushev hit the road back to Bulgaria, he showed the fi lm to producer Marc Bertrand. Bertrand liked the fi lm immediately.
“Th éodore showed me the fi lm with the Sviridov music,” recalls Bertrand, “and I was really moved by the perfect ‘marriage’
between the picture and the music.” When Bertrand asked Ushev what he planned on doing with Tower, Ushev had no answer. “My only goal was to show it to my father.” Bertrand convinced him to fi nish the fi lm with the NFB. “It felt natural,” adds Bertrand,
“to fi nish the fi lm in the best condition possible and to fi nally produce it.” Ushev agreed.
Bertrand showed the fi lm around the NFB and everyone was impressed. Th ere was just one problem: no one could determine who owned the copyright to the music. Sviridov had died in 1998 and according to a Copyright Board of Canada document dated September 13, 2005: “the person who inherited his copyright has since passed away . . . (and) that the copyright entitlement over the works of Sviridov is the object of a dispute before the Russian
civil courts that will not be resolved for some time yet.” After the Copyright Board of Canada rejected the application, the NFB decided to negotiate directly with the Russians.
“It became a nightmare,” says Ushev, “but the NFB helped me enormously. Th eir entire legal department was involved into the process. It is really incredible how diffi cult is to deal with the Russians. Everything that seems easy becomes complicated. So, even when the bureaucrats tease an artist, he cannot live without them. It is like a family, they hate each other, but cannot live without. And the next morning are in love again.”
Fortunately, the copyright issues — which somehow seem appropriate for a fi lm that, in part, deals with the uneasy relation-ship between art and state — were solved just in time for Tower to have its world premiere in September 2005 at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
Ushev credits the NFB for more than just taking on Tower:
“Before starting at the NFB, animation was a hobby for me. I made internet movies, put them online and forgot about them.
Suddenly I felt responsible. I couldn’t do this movie if I was not working at NFB.”
“Tower Bawher was a therapy,” admits Ushev. “I did it to cure myself from my memories. Every child of an artist tries to escape from his mighty shadow, and to create his own world. And almost no child can do it.”
Tower is more than just a search for self and an ode to a father:
it is also a tribute to those artists who continually struggle to escape from the ominous and numbing shadows of bureaucracy and censorship. It’s appropriate that Tower has become an NFB fi lm. For over 60 years, the NFB has struggled, successfully and
unsuccessfully, with that precarious relationship between artist and bureaucrat, and really, it’s the struggle that counts. It’s the struggle that is life.
In 2006, Ushev somehow found time to make three fi lms.
What’s even more impressive is how diff erent the fi lms are in terms of technique and tone.
Tzaritza (meaning “seashell”) was made for the NFB’s Talespinners series. Th e object of the series was to present fi lms that dealt with multicultural experiences from a child’s perspec-tive. Ushev chose to tell a story about a Canadian- born Bulgarian girl whose family visits Bulgaria to see her grandmother and learn more about her parents’ native country. After they return home to Canada, the girl wishes that the Black Sea would move closer to their home so that her grandmother could join them.
Minus the annoying, shrill voice of the girl narrating, the fi lm is one of Ushev’s most accomplished (and upbeat) fi lms — a lus-cious collage of luminous imagery that captures the wonder of being a child, when seemingly simple experiences captivate and thrill you. Tzaritza is a celebration of family, but it also touches on the diffi culties in bringing two worlds together.
Ushev drew the inspiration from a Bulgarian family he knew in Montreal. “Th ey were like a mirror to my family. My daughter was just born. It was a story about the usual and very common dysfunction in all immigrant families, where the child is born Canadian, and they are new arrivals.”
Originally, Ushev wanted to explore the diff erent perspectives of Bulgaria. “Th e child never completely understands the point of view of her father’s and mother’s, for her the other country is just a touristy, funny destination, but another place. For the
parents, it is a place, full with emotions, and history. Th e only meeting point is the lovely grandmother.”
Th e parents’ perspective is largely absent from the fi lm and Ushev was not at all pleased with this. “Th is was my fi rst offi cial NFB fi lm and I didn’t know how to deal with all the obstacles of bureaucracy. I don’t like the fi nal result. I wrote the story. But the producers insisted that professional scriptwriter come in. So he started putting in those stupid ice- cream stories, etc. Basically I’ve put more energy to fi ght for my ideas, than to make the fi lm.
At the end I was totally exhausted. I ended with almost all my original ideas, but all my energy was gone.”
Sadly, the real girl’s grandmother died one week before she was scheduled to visit her family in Montreal. “It was supposed to be her fi rst arrival here,” says Ushev, “and it was going to be put at the end of the fi lm.” After her death, Ushev told his friend that he wasn’t going to fi nish the fi lm but his friend disagreed. “He told me fi nish it,” says Ushev, “because this will be the best thing for the memory of my mother. So this is why I put this end. Th e mother will never come to Montreal, and will never spend the Christmas with them, but she will be with them forever.”
In 2006, NFB producer Michael Fukushima approached Ushev to tell him that Sony, Rogers (a Canadian cable company) and Bravo! (a Canadian TV channel) wanted some mobile fi lm content. Ushev proposed “an idea about the bipolar nature of the seduction; how you hate someone and someplace, and still it seduces you and you miss it after.”
It was a juxtaposition between a man, and a woman, cultures, noise and the calmness of Zen, dark and bright . . .” Fukushima approved the idea and less than three weeks later, Ushev handed
him the fi lm, Sou (which means “manic depressive” in Japanese and “unbearable noise” in Chinese).
Sou is based on Ushev’s experience as a tourist in Japan. Using a collage of kitsch Japanese imagery, Ushev creates a feverish and maddening visual assault that perfectly conveys the exhausting, ignorant and whirlwind experience of a stranger in a strange land.
And for the grand fi nale of 2006, Ushev fi nally completed the fi lm that had been following him since his web design days.
During his time working for “all those shitty companies,” Ushev decided that it was time to get a grip on his life, to stop wasting time being miserable and to get to the process of living. He found similar sentiments expressed in the writings of Franz Kafka, and in particular a story from Th e Trial about a man who waits behind a closed door guarded by a gatekeeper. “Kafka fi rst wrote it as a short story,” says Ushev, “and published it in a small local news-paper. I later discovered that the story is actually a very old Jewish tale that he just adapted. So, he is not even the author of it.”
Behind the scenes, Susan Fuda, Ushev’s producer from Valkyrie Films (the original producers of the fi lm), not only managed to get the excerpt from Walter Ruttmann’s fi lm that appears at the beginning, but also received permission to use the music of the famous Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. “She arranged it for very little money,” says Ushev. “Everybody was telling me that it wasn’t possible, he never gives his music for animated fi lms anymore.
He wanted to see the fi lm. We sent it and he gave me the rights.”
Th e NFB had refused the fi lm when Ushev initially proposed it in 2003, but fi nally Ushev decided to complete the fi lm using his own money and what he’d been given from Valkyrie and Quebec’s provincial government funding body Société de développement
des entreprises culturelles (SODEC). When he was fi nished, he showed Th e Man Who Waited to Marc Bertrand. “I didn’t expect them to take it,” says Ushev. “I think they took it because basically it costs nothing. But I’m very grateful, they came in as co- producers and distributed the fi lm internationally.”
Highlighted by Pärt’s haunting score, and woodcut- style draw-ings with rich red and black colors, Th e Man Who Waited is a beautiful expressionistic work that shifts Kafka’s story about law to a more personal story about the search for truth. A man waits by the open door of truth that is guarded by a gatekeeper; he is told that he’s not ready to go in. Th e man waits and waits. Before he dies, he is told that this was his door and that he could have gone in anytime he wanted. Instead, he has just waited for his entire life to fi nd the truth and now it’s too late.
“For me,” says Ushev, “this my best fi lm. I did everything that I wanted to in it. It contains all the feelings, and all the grief, and all the struggles of this time in my life, of eight months of happiness, fear, and despair.”
Although Th e Man Who Waited didn’t perform as well as Tower
Although Th e Man Who Waited didn’t perform as well as Tower