To the sound of a ramshackle brass band, a world slides towards ruin, carrying with it houses, birds, idols, balloons and whatever is left of reason. Theodore Ushev's Vertical combines expressionistic graphics with a scathing black humour and sense of the absurd.

Set to a kinetic soundtrack, Sou is a dazzling multi-layered animated collage piece on how a Western man, through ill-equipped eyes, views the seductive qualities of the pell mell kitsch that is the modern Japanese society.

From the moment she was born, Vaysha was a very special girl. With her left eye she can only see into the past, and with her right she can only see the future. The past is familiar and safe, the future is sinister and threatening. The present is a blind spot. In captivating parabolic imagery, the award-winning animation artist Theodore Ushev illustrates the world through Vaysha’s eyes.

Tracks an unknown man’s life as he sifts through memories of his youth in Bulgaria through to his increasingly rootless and melancholic adulthood in Canada.

How to maintain a life while on lock-down. A comic portrait of the artist in pandemic times.

National Film Board of Canada and staff wish a Happy Birthday to Annecy Festival

Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcus…

In a dystopian future, a nation of bio-titans has been created and the female sex and procreation have become obsolete. As the Earth turns toxic, the bio-titans are eager to colonise the cosmos on board a colossal spaceship, taking with them only one female body kept barely alive as a reminder of the troubled past. But everything changes when the immortal calligrapher Krypton, tasked with creating an indestructible copy of the entire written heritage of his kin, sees a forbidden book turn into a feisty girl, Gargara.

A woman writes a letter that will be read by a man in prison. A letter full of love, worry, compassion, suffering and hope. Freedom for Jafar Panahi, and all imprisoned Iranian filmmakers.

Theodore Ushev’s acclaimed 20th century trilogy concludes with this brilliant fusion of 3D and Russian constructivist-styled animation. Recycling elements of surrealism and cubism, this animated short by Theodore Ushev focuses on the relationship between art and war. Propelled by the exalting “invasion” theme from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony (No. 7), the film presents imagery of combat fronts and massacres, leading us from Dresden to Guernica, from the Spanish Civil War to Star Wars. It is at once a symphony that serves the war machine, that stirs the masses, and art that mourns the dead, voices its outrage and calls for peace.