Gloria Victoria
2012 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Theodore Ushev
Genres: animation, experimental, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Shostakovich's 'invasion' theme from the Leningrad Symphony drives images from Dresden and Guernica to the Spanish Civil War and imagined star wars. Theodore Ushev's film mourns the dead while calling for peace.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ushev's doing the thing everyone expects from a war film — dead serious, mournful, paired with classical music — which is exactly why it's boring. Even the surreal star wars tangent feels like it's apologizing for existing.
A masterclass in how montage becomes elegy: Ushev situates this firmly in the lineage of avant-garde war cinema (think Resnais, think *Night and Fog*), but the precision of cutting Shostakovich's invasion theme against Dresden and Guernica elevates it into formal argument — this is how you make historical grief feel both archival and urgent.
The single decision that locks this: laying the orchestral swell *under* silent archival footage rather than letting the music comment from above — that inversion of expected hierarchy forces you to watch the images as their own statement, which is where the film's actual power lives.