Ottawa International Animation Festival 2018 - Turbine
A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he’s fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action.
Interview with Director Alex Boya
Watch Turbine here:
Why did you make your film?
When I’m free to be creative, I start playing. I define it as being a “sensonaut” (an astronaut of the senses) who makes stories with audiovisual elements that trigger feelings; I archive all this in detailed drawings and animate them to catch thoughts. My animations are like therapeutic maps or meditation. The methodic creation and alignment of illustrations I define as “medical” formed Turbine. The film documents a fauna in a damp place trapped in limbo. I think Turbine may be a window into my private bestiary of “mythological creatures,” humanoids that prowl around in one all-encompassing world.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
Turbine is a sequence of drawings that are clinically concise and undefined at the same time, deliberately suspended in a milky fog to be incomplete. Connect the dots and explore the sepia-toned world inside. The “aero-dynamic man” has charmed and satisfied many.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
The story has several threads, as the two characters are attached to their mode of transportation like doppelgängers. To make Turbine, I revisited places in my past, both as a Canadian and as a Bulgarian. The geography of these two places is fractured but literally woven into the fibre, veins and tree roots in the ink drawings. It’s weird in that sense, because Turbine clearly shows an industrial place in Eastern Europe locked in time, but then you have a western nuclear family unit and some of the American dream in a rhapsodic depiction of kitchen appliances. I deploy both “eastern” and “western” symbols in my visual strategy...
Turbine is a love story with two characters who are incompatible at first, and also incomplete in themselves. They have missing pieces and attempt to solve this lack by using appendages to their bodies. These beings are also transactional in nature. They are both “in transit.” A railway is depicted. A locomotive and a plane are associated with the wife and the husband respectively.
With regard to the theme of transformation, the construction of a transcontinental railway is the first tangible action meant to kick-start a controversial identity-building project for many nations, including Canada. A new unity being born simultaneously alongside technology, in consequence to economic, political, and military actions. Canadian railways evoke unity or transcontinental molecular splicing. The way my locomotive in Turbine moves as if it was a caterpillar about to mutate so it can fly is perhaps in tandem with the hatched identity of the story’s characters.
The sluggish motion of the train is not straight, but you’re still moving “forward,” whatever that implies with regards to your relationship to the idea of “progress.” On the opposing end of a dichotomy imposed by Turbine’s romantic intrigue is the plane, another national hallmark, airborne and unrestrained by a railway.
The idea of paradigm shift is important because of the innate volatility engendered when someone is feeling his/her way in the dark, your unity being tested in light of “progress” towards an “improved” state, which in our case is bodily. The husband/pilot and wife symbolize one of those instances where opposing forces test the resolve of identity and unity (with all the collateral that involves, thus the “tragic” in “tragicomedy”)...
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
I received interesting feedback on the script from my producer, Jelena Popović, and filmmaker Theodore Ushev. Our female protagonist confronts a husband who has an airplane turbine instead of a human face, the latter being stuck on the front of his airplane. Her quest is to “repair” things as if their lives were cogs in a clock. My initial tone was like an apathetic survey, similar to the attitude of a reporter in a Discovery Channel program detachedly observing the demise of gazelles in the Savannah. We, however, opened the script to a broader emotional spectrum. It remained the story of a mechanical being, but also a slice of life, human despite everything. And the fan in the kitchen (as the second turbine of the film) evolved to inspire intrigue and adulterous derision.
Following this groundwork, 3,760 medical drawings were created by adopting the logic of copperplate engraving. I collaborated with painter and children’s book illustrator Daniela Zekina. It’s an encyclopedic approach to portraying surreal life.
To counterbalance this rigid visual approach, Turbine’s transcendental music opened the world of the film. Sound allowed all the objects to breathe. This is thanks to Judith Gruber-Stitzer and Oliver Calvert in collaboration with Foley artist Lise Wedlock. Turbine was a labour of love for so many people...
What type of feedback have you received so far? Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
My audience so far has been conflicted as to whether the ending is a positive one or the unwinding of a terrible fate. I can’t say if it’s a happy end or a sad end, and people seem evenly divided. I love how this detail says more about the viewer’s own idea of “living happily ever after” than anything else. I guess your idea of marriage also affects this...
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com?
It’s as if it just learned to walk; it’s the beginning of its career in festivals. Right now, I hope as many people as possible can see it distributed by the National Film Board of Canada. I’d love Turbine to have a transcontinental base that is multilocational and limbic, just like any sterile airport—a place out of context, for the characters to live in the minds of viewers.
Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
Everyone involved in Turbine at the National Film Board of Canada plays a vital role in the project’s successful propagation. Additionally, I’m interested in the contribution of education professionals to bringing drawn animation to the mainstream as a form of meditation with beneficial effects.
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
I would like the film to be enjoyed. It is possible to develop mild aversions (even physical discomfort) when fixating on the turbine for too long. It’s been said that it makes some people dizzy, like an optical illusion.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
I’m not sure. “If you could be anywhere else right now, where would it be?”
“Where” refers to where you want to be in your life, both in your existence and in your relationship with others.
What other projects are the key creatives developing or working on now?
I jumped on my next project two days after Turbine’s last day of production.
Interview: September 2018
We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series, music video, women's films, LGBTQIA+, POC, First Nations, scifi, supernatural, horror, world cinema. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
Turbine
A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he’s fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action.
Length: 8min 21s
Director: Alex Boya
Producer: Jelena Popović (Producer) / Michael Fukushima (Producer & Executive Producer (NFB))
About the writer, director and producer:
ALEX BOYA is a Bulgarian-born, Montreal-based animator who studied animation at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Inspired by medical illustrations and the copper plate “eau forte” technique, his first short with the NFB—Focus, a synaptic journey through attention deficit disorder—earned him an Honorable Mention for Best Canadian Animation at the 2015 Ottawa International Animation Festival. Turbine is his second film with the NFB.
JELENA POPOVIC is a producer at the NFB Animation Studio since January 2014, and forged her skills as production manager and associate producer on conventional, interactive and hybrid documentary and animation films. She directed and co-wrote the documentary The Knights of Orlando (2007) and edited Patrick Doyon’s Oscar-nominated short Sunday, as well as three editions of NFB’s acclaimed Hothouse program. She co-produced with Marcy Page Theodore Ushev’s Blood Manifesto (Prix Créativité, FNC 2015), Sheldon Cohen’s My Heart Attack, (Best Animated Short, Cleveland Int’l Fest) and Munro Ferguson’s Minotaur VR. With Maral Mohammadian, she co-produced Naked Island, a series of public service alerts by some of the top Canadian animators exposing the dark underbelly of modern times. Her latest releases are Hedgehog’s Home, a stop-motion fable about cherishing one’s home directed by Eva Cvijanović and co-produced by Vanja Andrijević (Bonobostudio, Croatia), which won over 30 prizes including Special Mention at Berlinale and Prix Jeune public in Annecy, and Manivald, a gender-ambiguous tale about the boomerang generation by Chintis Lundgren, a coproduction with Estonia and Croatia selected at Sundance, SXSW, Annecy and awarded at OIAF, LIAF, NYSFF, Aspen, Denver, Manchester etc.
MICHAEL FUKUSHIMA has been making films since 1984. He joined the NFB in 1990 to direct the animated documentaryMinoru: Memory of Exile (1992), winner of the Hot Docs Best Short Documentary award. Michael became an NFB animation producer in 1997, co-founding the NFB’s flagship emerging filmmaker program, Hothouse, in 2002, and opening up the studio to new audiences and new technologies with a move towards urban and diverse stories and creators.
He was appointed executive producer of the NFB’s fabled Animation Studio in 2013. Notable films produced or executive produced by Michael include Genie Award winner cNote (2004), by Chris Hinton; Shira Avni’s animated documentary Tying Your Own Shoes (2009), which won the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig and the prestigious NHK Japan Prize; Ann Marie Fleming’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010); Muybridge’s Strings (2011), by Oscar-nominated Japanese filmmaker Koji Yamamura; Oscar-nominated films Dimanche (2011), by Patrick Doyon, and Me and My Moulton (2014), by Torill Kove; and, most recently, Cordell Barker’s If I Was God and Randall Okita’s The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer. Michael now mostly produces the producers and offers up sagacity, but he continues to keep his hand in —this year, on the first short film in two decades by Oscar winners Alison Snowden and David Fine, and on Oscar winner Torill Kove’s next short film.
ONF
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ALEX BOYA
Official Website: http://alexboya.com/
Facebook : aboyadjiev
Twitter: @alexboya_
Where can I watch it next and in the coming month? The film will have its world premiere at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) on September 27 and 30. It will also be shown at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) on October 2 and 9.