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Theodore Ushev awarded with Lifetime Achievement Award at film festival in Italy

Photo: BTA

The Bulgarian animator and film director Theodore Ushev has been awarded the prize for overall creativity at the 10th edition of the Animaphix international festival for original animated cinema in Bagheria on the island of Sicily. 
The festival opened with a cinema concert by Giovanni Sollima, one of the greatest cello virtuosos, who through baroque, rock and metal music presented pictures from the work The Sleepwalker (Sonámbulo) by the Bulgarian director Teodor Ushev. 

Media outlets such as Palermo Today describe this pairing as "a meeting between a 'reckless virtuoso' who spans the history of music to the sounds of modernity with a 'punk director', with a poetics made up of figurative art, music and cinema that speaks directly to the art itself and the viewer". 
Theodore Ushev is presented as one of the most prominent figures in animated cinema of the first quarter of the 3rd millennium. A special retrospective is dedicated to him and he is awarded the Renato Guttuso Prize for his outstanding work, reports BNR correspondent in Italy Elena Shakhanova.

The festival is being held at the Villa Cattolica in Bagheria, home to the museum of Renato Guttuso, one of the greatest Italian artists of the 20th century. 

92 films are participating, 52 of them in the competition. The winner will be awarded the Gran Prix Animaphix.




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