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PRODUCCIÓN / FINANCIACIÓN Bulgaria

Theodore Ushev explora un futuro distópico en Phi 1.618

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- En su primer largometraje, el director búlgaro utilizará una mezcla de imágenes reales con secuencias animadas

Theodore Ushev explora un futuro distópico en Phi 1.618
Deyan Donkov y Martina Apostolova en Phi 1.618

Este artículo está disponible en inglés.

Bulgarian director Theodore Ushev, who received an Academy Award nomination for his animated short Blind Vaysha in 2017, is currently in post-production with his feature debut, Phi 1.618 [+lee también:
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, which will blend live-action footage with animation. The feature is being staged by Bulgarian production company Peripeteia Films, represented by Orlin Ruevski and Vladislav Todorov.

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The screenplay, written by Todorov and based on his own novel, The Spinning Top, explores a dystopian future where science conquers death, and a nation of bio-titans, a breed of asexual, immortal men, has been created. 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 (Deyan Donkov), tasked with creating an indestructible copy of the entire written heritage of his kin, sees a forbidden book turn into a feisty girl, Gargara (Martina Apostolova).

The film’s budget amounts to circa €800,000. The Bulgarian National Film Center supported the project with €470,000. Phi 1.618 was shot in the autumn of 2020 at various locations by the Bulgarian seaside and in central Bulgaria. The film’s DoP is Emil Christov. Irmena Chichikova, Vasil Duev, Nikolay Stanoev and Gerasim Georgiev play supporting characters.

Producer Vladislav Todorov tells Cineuropa that his team is currently searching for a Canadian production partner so that several minutes of animation designed by Theodore Ushev can be produced in Canada. He also says that shooting during the pandemic proved very tough. “We took extraordinary precautionary measures to ensure the safety of the crew, and luckily no one got sick,” says the producer.

Ushev says that shooting during the pandemic also proved difficult from a surprising point of view: “Though our film started off as a dystopian project, during the shoot, we became afraid that the times were indeed posing a challenge for us [as reality was becoming just as absurd as the film]. And we faced an extremely interesting situation where reality was copying our dystopian script. We were afraid at one point that it may end up as a social-realist drama, if the world follows fantasy so quickly. This is irony, of course.” The director also says that he changed various scenes, locations and lines in the dialogue so that Phi 1.618 would become more absurd. “‘Of absurdity and men’ is a valid tagline for our film. The goal was to craft an atypical movie for this [Balkan] area, crammed with prejudice, cynicism and irrational stubbornness. A film that goes beyond the obvious,” the director explains.

Phi 1.618 is expected to wrap post-production in the first half of 2022.

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(Traducción del inglés)

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