Born in 1968 in Kyustendil, Bulgaria, Theodore Ushev is a graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. He first made a name as a poster artist in his native country before settling in Montreal, Canada, in 1999. There he quickly acquired a reputation as a prolific and gifted animator. Between 1999 and 2004 he directed a dozen or so short films destined to be webcast, via his site . This period saw him explore several different graphic styles: Aurora (1999) references the Soviet avant-gardes, Dissociation (2001) and Well-tempered Heads (2003) skilfully evoke woodcuts, the three films in the series Needles (2002) as well as Early in Fall, Late in Winter (2002) feature a rigid line and filmed style with a deliberate computer-animation look, while Walking on by… (2003) makes use of sprightly and supple pencil drawings. An allegory recalling the myth of Sisyphus, Time is… (1999) combines bold brushstrokes with wash… read more
Born in 1968 in Kyustendil, Bulgaria, Theodore Ushev is a graduate of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. He first made a name as a poster artist in his native country before settling in Montreal, Canada, in 1999. There he quickly acquired a reputation as a prolific and gifted animator. Between 1999 and 2004 he directed a dozen or so short films destined to be webcast, via his site . This period saw him explore several different graphic styles: Aurora (1999) references the Soviet avant-gardes, Dissociation (2001) and Well-tempered Heads (2003) skilfully evoke woodcuts, the three films in the series Needles (2002) as well as Early in Fall, Late in Winter (2002) feature a rigid line and filmed style with a deliberate computer-animation look, while Walking on by… (2003) makes use of sprightly and supple pencil drawings. An allegory recalling the myth of Sisyphus, Time is… (1999) combines bold brushstrokes with wash textures. It is also a clear descendant of the Eastern European animation tradition from before the fall of the Berlin. Vertical (2003), Ushev’s first collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), closed this period and paid tribute to Jan Lenica.
In 2005, Ushev began to work on a trilogy that freely explores the connections between artistic avant gardes and drifts in ideologies and art in the 20th. The first two instalments, Tower Bawher (2005, six awards) and Drux Flux (2008, four awards), proved considerably successful. Drawing inspiration from famous musical pieces-by Georgy Sviridov in the first case and Aleksandr Mosolov in the secondthe filmmaker references, reorganizes and reframes architecture, visual arts and cinema signs from the Constructivist (Tower Bawher_) and Futurist movements (_Drux Flux). During this same period, Ushev made two personal films, The Man Who Waited (2006, three awards) and Tzaritza (2006, two awards). In the first, adapted from a parable by Kafka, he revisited the style he developed for Dissociation. For the second, a children’s film, he deployed an opulent, dynamic graphic sensibility, assembling disparate components (drawings, photographs, objects, etc.) that lend the whole a paper-cutout look. In recounting a little girl’s relationship to her Bulgarian grandmother, Ushev addressed the theme of immigration for the first time.
Demonstrating his keen interest in new content delivery platforms, in 2006 Ushev made the micro-movie film Facing Champlain (Jean-François Pouliot, 2008). He then began work on his most ambitious film, from a script by Chris Robinson, with whom he had previously collaborated as the illustrator of the book Ballad of a Thin Man: In Search of Ryan Larkin (AWN Press, 2008). —National Film Board of Canada
