ANIMATIONWorld — December 27, 2016
Theodore Ushev’s ‘Blind Vaysha’ a Modern Parable About Living in the Present

Theodore Ushev’s Blind Vaysha (Vaysha l’aveugle), the 2016 animated short produced by Marc Bertrand for the National Film Board of Canada, with the participation of ARTE France, is a metaphor for the human struggle to live in the present moment.

Based on a story by Bulgarian poet, playwright and author Georgi Gospodinov, the 3D animated film — Ushev’s 13th short film project — employs a bold, graphic style to tell the tale of a girl who sees past out of her left eye and the future from her right — and so is unable to live in the present. Montreal actress Caroline Dhavernas performed the narration for the film, in both its French and English-language versions. In his fourth collaboration with the filmmaker, Bulgarian musician and composer Kottarashky provided the music.

The project began in France, at Fontevraud Abbey, where Ushev was inspired by the medieval drawings and designs he saw there. He did fifty paintings during his month-long stay in Maine-et-Loire, drawing inspiration from the Abbey’s architecture and with the design of film’s central character influenced by paintings of Eleanor of Aquitaine. At the time, Ushev was already working with a text by Gospodinov for an upcoming film when he and a group of friends had the idea of making “an omnibus out of some of his short stories.” While reading them, Ushev was captivated by the story of Blind Vaysha, which immediately struck him as being suited to his style of filmmaking.

The eight-minute short film is animated on a Cintiq tablet in a linocut-style, a medium Ushev had worked with since the age of 12. He sought to reproduce the visual artifacts of the linocut technique by never using the “Undo” command on his computer while drawing: “Because with linocut, once your hand carves it, it is gone,” he comments. “You cannot put the black back. This creates a natural feeling of the unpredictable, of mistakes and the holy imperfection of the image — which is the basis of every creation.” As with two of Ushev’s previous films, Drux Flux and Gloria Victoria, Blind Vaysha was produced as a stereoscopic 3D film. (Read full story…)