The film project by Romanian director and screenwriter Andrei Ujică, which began in 2012 with the support of the HfG | ZKM Filminstitut (formerly ZKM | Filminstitut), Karlsruhe, and the “Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain”, Paris, will celebrate its world premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on September 4.
Entitled “TWST - Things We Said Today”, Ujică takes up a Beatles song in which past and present intertwine in an intangible way. The film takes viewers into the parallel realities of New York in 1965 - from the Beatles' concert at the huge Shea Stadium in Queens to the New York World's Fair and the riots in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood, which were televised on the East Coast.
Andrei Ujică spent more than a decade working on his first feature film since his monumental “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu” (2010), creating a new kind of urban symphony. The multifaceted portrait of New York and its people, from Harlem to Jones Beach, from the mundane to the magical, is based entirely on archival material - from news broadcasts to personal 8mm film diaries. Ujică's film is also a work of the imagination, using drawings by French artist Yann Kebbi and the voices of young New York actors to recall this vanished moment in history with a poignant, unmistakable flair.
Following its festival premiere in Venice, where it is screening 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.