Theodore Ushev to Adapt Shane Jones’ Novel ‘Light Boxes’

Bulgarian filmmaker Theodore Ushev, Oscar-nominated in the animated short film category in 2017 for “Blind Vaysha,” is in pre-production on feature film “Light Boxes,” which he will present at the Venice Production Bridge’s Gap-Financing Market, running Sept. 4-6.

The film, which will include stop-motion animation and live-action sequences, is an adaptation of Shane Jones’ cult novel exploring the tension between escaping war through imagination and confronting its reality.

Set in a war-torn Ukrainian town, the story follows Anna, a 13-year-old girl who, despite restrictions imposed by Russian occupying forces, ventures into a ruined library and rescues a burning book titled “Light Boxes.”

Seeking refuge from constant bombardment, Anna discovers Bianca, her imaginary double, living in a fantastical town imprisoned by a war of its own. There, the tyrannical February has condemned its inhabitants to eternal winter and forbids them from flying, while a masked resistance movement known as The Solution fights to restore light and freedom.

With neither reality nor imagination offering an escape from tyranny, the film asks whether hope, memory and love can persevere when war threatens to extinguish them all.

For Ushev, survival lies in imitation. “The characters are constantly trying to reproduce what they have lost to convince themselves it can somehow return,” he tells Variety. “That is what I find fascinating about every totalitarian regime – no matter how oppressed people become, they will always find ways to recreate what has been taken from them, to keep hope alive.”

Until “Light Boxes,” the director had never wanted to make an animated feature, believing a project of such scale would “risk the individual touch, the imperfection” that defined his work. That changed in 2010, when, while presenting his short “Lipsett Diaries” in Toronto, he stumbled upon Jones’ novel. “As soon as I read ‘Light Boxes,’ I immediately imagined how I would recreate it with puppets,” he recalls.

Producer Jacqueline Wagenstein, founder of lead production company Cinelibri, acquired the adaptation rights, previously held by American filmmaker Spike Jonze, and set the fable up as a five-country co-production between Bulgaria, Canada, France, Belgium and Poland. The project is to become the largest Bulgarian-led animated feature production to date.

Visually, “Light Boxes” will distinguish its two worlds through different media: Anna’s reality will unfold in live action with a predominantly Ukrainian cast, while Bianca’s world will be rendered in stop-motion using puppets designed and crafted by Ushev. “Bianca’s world will be the main one,” he explains. “For me, the puppet animation is at the heart of the film.”

Symbols are at the story’s core. With natural light extinguished, its inhabitants recreate it through floating lights, drifting dandelions and artificial suns – man-made substitutes for the warmth and hope their world no longer provides. “Lighting will play a very important role in how we shoot the film, but also in the sets themselves. The materials used to build them will include fabrics recycled from parachutes, kites and other objects designed to fly,” comments the director.

That symbolism extends to February’s ban on flight, which Ushev sees as stripping people of their capacity to dream. “When you fly, you dream,” he says. “And the first thing every tyrant does is take away people’s dreams – their hope that things can change.”

The film acts as a reminder that preserving the light requires more than hoping it will endure. “The present is crucial to what happens in our future,” he says. “If we don’t act now and change things, then the future will also exist in the dark.”