"Out of the Present" (1996) introduced by Andrei Ujică

The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York is proud to support The Museum of Modern Art’s first complete North American retrospective dedicated to Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică, one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive and influential film essayists.

Out of the Present. 1996. Germany. Written and directed by Andrei Ujică. DCP. In Russian; English subtitles. 96 min.

Out of the Present charts the 10-month orbital isolation of Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut on the Mir space station who took 5,000 trips around the Earth while, back home, his native Soviet Union imploded and a rave broke out on New Year’s Eve 1991 at the Cosmonautics Pavilion at Moscow’s VDNKh, the “Permanent Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy.” Framed through the first two sequences ever shot in space on 35mm for a feature film, with guidance from Vadim Yusov, Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematographer on Solaris, and with allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey…