Cellist Giovanni Sollima opens the tenth edition of Animaphix with “Sonámbulo”, a cine-concert inspired by the works of Theodore Ushev, scheduled for Tuesday 22 July, at 9pm, at Villa Cattolica, in Bagheria.
Through sounds ranging from baroque to rock and metal, Sollima, an internationally renowned composer, will retrace the pictorial works of the Bulgarian director and artist, of Canadian adoption.
At the same time, director Theodore Ushev, who will receive the 2024 Guttuso Prize for the large number of films produced with the technique of painting in movement, will be dedicated a retrospective that includes almost all of the films he made in a quarter of a century. Admission to the exhibition is free until all seats are taken.
The “Sleepwalker” film concert
The title takes its name from Ushev’s short film of the same name, it represents a vast sound canvas where the director’s works intertwine with new compositions and adapt to the nuances of sound: it is the meeting between two versatile artists, one a “reckless virtuoso ”, who embraces the history of music until reaching the sounds of contemporaneity, the other “punk director”, with a poetic made of figurative art, music and cinema, who with his metalanguage speaks directly to the art itself and to the spectator.
Theodore Ushev
The continuous search for expressive forms, the curiosity towards everything and every place make the director one of the pre-eminent figures in animated cinema of the first quarter of a century of the third millennium. The retrospective presented during the tenth edition of Animaphix includes almost all of the films he made in a quarter of a century, among these stands out Tower Bawher (2005), a cavalcade of images and a wild ride through Russian constructivism on music by Georgy Sviridov, from which some characteristics of his art can already be deduced, in particular his privileged relationship with music, as in the subsequent Drux Flux (2008), a partly figurative and partly abstract short film – with music by Alexandre Mossolov and inspired by the book “One-Dimensional Man” by philosopher Herbert Marcuse -, in which the director deconstructs industrial scenes and their terrifying geometry to show the inhumanity of progress, and Gloria Victoria (2012) which takes inspiration from the Leningrad Symphony ( n. 7) by Dimitri Shostakovich, where a sort of conflicting admiration with constructivist aesthetics continues and deepens, giving life to a real trilogy on the relationships between art and power.
Music literally takes over in Sonámbulo (2015), an independent short film inspired by the poem “Romance Sonambulo” by Federico García Lorca, which represents a surrealist journey of shapes and colors on a frenetic piece by the Bulgarian musician Kottarashky, who had signed a few years earlier the piece of music on which Demoni (2012) is based, a succession of Eastern European folk art scenes running across a vinyl record.
Even more structured and complex appears the pseudo documentary Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett Diaries, 2012) created starting from an alleged discovery of the diaries of the unfortunate Canadian artist Arthur Lipsett, whose artistic stature has always been underestimated also due to his whirlwind descent into depression and madness, until his suicide in 1986, and the more recent Physique de la Tristesse (The Physics of Sorrow, 2019), a monumental film in animated painting, perhaps the highest artistic point reached to date by Ushev, based about the novel by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, who reconstructs his life story like a labyrinth, wandering into the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all.
To further delve into the work of the Bulgarian-Canadian director, Borislav Kolev’s Unseen Connections (2022) will be screened, a documentary about Theodore Ushev that talks about the biographical, historical, cultural and subcultural connections that shaped him as a person and an artist.
Furthermore, the VR version of Vaysha l’Aveugle (Blind Vaysha, 2016) will be presented, based on a text by Georgi Gospodinov which tells the story of a girl who sees the past with her left eye and the future with her right eye, and therefore is unable to live in the present. Viewing the film will only be possible through viewers in the VR Zone of the Festival, with which the individual spectator will have to choose whether to see the past or the future, giving life to different endings of the film.
ll festival
Animaphix – Nuovi Linguaggi Contemporanei Film Festival is created thanks to the contribution and patronage of the Ministry of Culture – general directorate for cinema and audiovisual; of the Sicilia Film Commission – which operates within the Tourism, Sport and Entertainment Department of the Sicilian Region; of the Municipality of Bagheria. With the support of the Regional Agency for the Protection of the Environment of Sicily (Arpa Sicilia), the Council of Arts and Letters of the Ministry of Culture and Communications of Quebec, the Quebec delegation in Rome, the Instituto Cervantes of Palermo , of the Embassy of the Czech Republic, of the Czech Center of Rome, of the Polish Institute of Rome.
“The Municipality of Bagheria – comments the mayor Filippo Maria Tripoli – has been committed, for some time now, to seizing every opportunity to promote the City, the territory, its culture, its traditions, its landscape and natural beauty and also the culinary and food and wine delicacies. With this spirit and appreciating the goodness of the program, every year, for ten years now, we choose to be alongside Animaphix, its director and creator Rosalba Colla, because this international festival offers us not only a cinematographic offer of short films with a wide European scope but also because it opens a window on the many who go to the City of Villas and Taste to follow this now ten-year festival”.
