"The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu" (2010) 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.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu. 2010. Romania/Germany. Directed by Andrei Ujică. 35mm. In Romanian; English subtitles. 180 min.

Andrei Ujică’s magisterial film stitches together 24 years of state propaganda images of the Romanian dictator and his wife, Elena—painstakingly choreographed pageants, diplomatic visits, party congresses, and unconvincingly merry scenes of home life—into an expansive vision of a nation in thrall to, and at the mercy of, a cult leader. Drawing on archival material that inadvertently reveals moments excised from the sanctioned narrative, Ujică illuminates the fissures and tensions that would lead to the Ceauşescus’ execution by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. As J. Hoberman observed in The New York Review of Books, “In…