Tower Bawher is about our frustrating drive to fight through the muddle of mediocrity in search of the stuff that makes us. All Tower Bahwer images © 2005 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.

Influenced by Russian constructivist artists like Dziga Vertov and the Stenberg Brothers, and featuring the dynamic score Time, Forward by Russian composer Georgy Sviridov (which Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin also used effectively in his short film, The Heart of the World) a litany of lines, shapes, colors and sounds storm across and around the screen of Theodore Ushev’s Tower Bawher. They go up. They go down. They come together and just as quickly fall apart. Tower Bawher is an intense existentialist film about our often frustrating and restless drive to fight through the muddle and clutter of mediocrity and suppression in search of the stuff that makes us. In the end, though, the paradox is that no matter how far we climb, seek, or find, everything falls apart. Things come together, but only for a moment. That’s the route of the ride.

Incredibly, Tower Bawher (For the record, bawher is a bit of a nonsense word. “Tower in Russian is baschnia,” Ushev explains. “But because of the Cyrillic alphabet, a foreigner will read it like bawhr, so Tower Bawher was perfect (Bauhaus, Bauer… ) was made in just a few weeks. “I start doing it one night in April [2005]. I was in a deep depression. My movie [Ushev was making a children’s film for the National Film Board of Canada] was not going well.” During a particularly restless night, Ushev woke up and remembered an idea he had to use the score, Time, Forward, by Russian composer, Georgy Sviridov. “For many years,” remembers Ushev, “this piece was the music for the evening news of the Soviet state TV. This program was broadcast every Friday.”

Tower Bawher was born out of filmmaker Theodore Ushev’s deep depression when a film he was making was not going well. He was inspired by Time, Forward, a musical piece from his childhood.

While the television hummed in the background, Ushev’s father worked on his own personal drawings and paintings, and also on more conventional propaganda posters that he made solely to earn a living. The memories of these Friday nights struck a chord with Ushev. “It was like an absurdist stage decoration. Before the news, there was usually a Russian children’s program on. Typically it featured very, very slow Russian animations like Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog. I’d fall asleep immediately. Then, suddenly, I’d be awakened by the uplifting Sviridov music, with turning globes, and the lines of the dynamic building of Communism.”

And so it was during a sleepless night in April that Ushev decided to make the movie. Five weeks later the finished film found its way to my desk. “I was not able to sleep during the entire process. It was like being in a trance, like I travelled back 30 years with a time machine. I didn’t think about festivals, or if the movie will be finished. I was just diving into my memories, like a ‘Cartesian theater.’ It was like a letter. I was in a hurry to show it to my father, because I planned to make a short vacation in Bulgaria. It was done for him.”

Before Ushev hit the road back to Bulgaria, he showed the film to producer Marc Bertrand of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Bertrand liked the film immediately. “Théo showed me the film with the Sviridov music,” recalls Bertrand, “and I was really moved by the perfect ‘marriage’ between the picture and the music. Théo was working at the NFB Studio at the time on Tzaritza [the aforementioned children’s film], so he was not eligible for a FAP [Filmmakers Assistance Programme] grant.” When Bertrand asked Ushev want he planned on doing with Tower, Ushev had no answer. “My only goal was to show it to my father.” Bertrand convinced him to finish the film with the NFB. “It felt natural,” adds Bertrand, “to finish the film in the best condition possible and to finally produce it.” Ushev agreed.