The film project by Romanian director and screenwriter Andrei Ujică was started in 2012 with the help of the HfG | ZKM Film Institute (formerly ZKM | Film Institute), Karlsruhe and the “Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain”, Paris. The world premiere will take place on September 4th at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
With the title “TWST – Things We Said Today”, Ujică takes up a song by the Beatles in which past and present intertwine in an intangible way. The film takes its viewers into the parallel realities of 1965 New York – from the Beatles’ concert in the huge Shea Stadium in Queens to the New York World’s Fair to the riots in Watts, a district of Los Angeles, which were televised on the East Coast.
For more than a decade, Andrei Ujică has worked on his first feature film since the monumental The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (2010), creating a new kind of urban symphony. The multifaceted portrayal of New York and its people, from Harlem to Jones Beach, from the everyday to the magical, is based entirely on archive material – from news broadcasts to personal 8mm film diaries. Ujică’s film is also a work of imagination, recalling this lost moment in history with the help of drawings by French artist Yann Kebbi and the voices of young New York actors.
After the festival premiere in Venice, where it is shown in the “Official Selection – Out of Competition”, the French-Romanian co-production “TWST – Things We Said Today” will be shown in the “Spotlight” section at the New York Film Festival in October.
