"Unknown Quantity" (2005) 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.

Unknown Quantity. 2005. Germany. Directed by Andrei Ujică. With Svetlana Alexiyevich, Paul Virilio. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 67 min.

In this theatrical version of a gallery installation, the French philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Belarussian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, author of Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future, grapple with the man-made tragedy of nuclear catastrophe and its implications for irrationality and fear in decision making and technological innovation. With shades of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker—the heroic men and women who volunteered to contain the Chernobyl meltdown referred to themselves, in fact, as “stalkers”—Virilio and Alexievich venture into a black-box zone of epistemological and ontological uncertainty as they contend with…