The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will present next month the first complete North American retrospective of Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică, described as “one of contemporary cinema’s finest film essayists.”

Highlights of the program, which runs from September 11 to September 16, include the filmmaker presenting a work-in-progress excerpt from his latest film, Matches and Days, “a meditation on how World Cup football has shaped the rhythms of his life and those of his son and grandchildren.”

Ujică will also present his most recent feature, TWST/Things We Said Today (2024), created in collaboration with writer Geoffrey O’Brien, about the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium.

The retrospective includes The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu (2010), made using 24 years of state propaganda images of the Romanian dictator and his wife and revealing “an expansive vision of a nation in thrall to, and at the mercy of, a cult leader”; and his collaboration with Harun Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution (1992), which makes use of official broadcasts of the dictator’s iron rule to suggest a chronology of the December 1989 events.

Out of the Present (1995) chronicles the 10-month orbital isolation of a Russian cosmonaut at the Mir space station while, back home, the Soviet Union was collapsing.

The retrospective also features 2 Pasolini (2000), which uses Pier Paolo Pasolini’s documentary Sopraluoghi in Palestina and a Tupac Shakur song to interrogate the making and remaking of history; and Unknown Quantity (2005), a theatrical version of a gallery installation in which French philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio and Belarussian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich “grapple with the manmade tragedy of nuclear catastrophe and its implications for irrationality and fear in decision-making and technological innovation.”

“Whether in confronting his own nation’s dark history or in evoking his first magical encounters with the Beatles and World Cup football, Ujică, who will be present to introduce many of the screenings, interrogates the politics of image making and history writing, and the ways in which the popular culture of songs, sports, and movies insinuates itself into our collective unconscious, defines our national identities, and shapes our memories, desires, and apprehension of ourselves and the world around us. Standing as we do on a precipice of revolutionary change - change brought on by AI, a steady diet of TikTok reels, and media consolidation and collusion with agents of power- Ujică provides the intellectual honesty and moral ballast needed to counter our present-day confusion and mistrust of what we see and what we’re told,” a presentation of the program reads.

Andrei Ujică born 1951 in Timişoara. He studied literature in Timișoara, Bucharest, and Heidelberg. In 1981, he left the country for Germany, and in 1990 he began making films.

The MoMA program is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, and Olivia Priedite, Program Coordinator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

(Photo: Inquam Photos /Raul Stef)

simona@romania-insider.com