ANDREI UJICĂ: THE MoMA RETROSPECTIVE
- RCI USA
- 11 minutes ago
- 3 min read
About The Event
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.
Bringing together works spanning more than three decades, the retrospective offers New York audiences a rare opportunity to encounter the full scope of Ujică’s cinema and his singular exploration of history, memory, politics, and the power of images. The filmmaker will be present to introduce several screenings and engage with audiences throughout the retrospective.
From his landmark films examining the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union to his deeply personal reflections on music, football, cinema, and memory, Ujică has consistently investigated the ways images shape our understanding of history—and of ourselves. His films reveal how political spectacle, mass media, and popular culture enter the collective imagination, influencing national identities, desires, fears, and personal recollection.
At a moment when artificial intelligence, rapidly evolving media platforms, and profound transformations in the production and circulation of images are challenging our confidence in what we see and what we are told, Ujică’s cinema acquires renewed urgency. His work invites us to look more carefully at images: who produces them, who controls them, what they conceal, and how they become history.
Among the highlights of the retrospective is a work-in-progress excerpt from Ujică’s latest film, Matches and Days, a meditation on the ways World Cup football has marked the rhythms of his own 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. The film returns to New York in August 1965 and the Beatles’ legendary appearance at Shea Stadium, approaching this watershed moment in popular culture through both archival imagination and personal memory. For the teenage Ujică, then living in a Romanian village near the Yugoslav border, the Beatles offered a glimpse of another world beyond the Iron Curtain—and an early revelation of art’s capacity to cross political and geographical boundaries.
Central to the retrospective is Ujică’s celebrated trilogy examining the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauşescu (2010), Ujică constructs an extraordinary three-hour portrait from 24 years of official state images of the Romanian dictator. Working almost entirely with archival footage, the film turns the visual language of propaganda back upon itself, revealing both the mechanisms of Ceauşescu’s personality cult and the contradictions beneath the carefully staged image of political power.
Videograms of a Revolution (1992), Ujică’s seminal collaboration with Harun Farocki, examines the Romanian Revolution of December 1989 through television broadcasts and amateur video recordings. As cameras move from instruments of official authority into the hands of ordinary citizens, the film captures not only the fall of a dictatorship but also a historic transformation in the relationship between political power, media, and those who record events as they unfold.
Completing the trilogy, Out of the Present (1995) follows Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev during his months aboard the Mir space station while, on Earth below him, the Soviet Union disappears. Seen from the extraordinary perspective of orbit, one of the defining geopolitical transformations of the 20th century becomes at once monumental, distant, and strangely intimate.
The program further includes 2 Pasolini (2000), which brings Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sopraluoghi in Palestina into dialogue with the music of Tupac Shakur to reflect on the making and remaking of history; and Unknown Quantity (2005), featuring French philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio and Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich in an exploration of nuclear catastrophe, technological risk, fear, and the limits of human decision-making.
Together, these works reveal Andrei Ujică as a filmmaker for whom cinema is not simply a means of representing history but a way of questioning how history itself is constructed. Moving between public archives and private memories, political upheaval and popular culture, his films ask us to reconsider the images through which the 20th and 21st centuries understand themselves.
The retrospective is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, and Olivia Priedite, Program Coordinator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.
Support for Andrei Ujică is provided by the Romanian Cultural Institute.
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York is honored to support this landmark presentation of Andrei Ujică’s work and to contribute to bringing one of the most important voices in Romanian and international cinema into renewed dialogue with American audiences.
For more details, visit MoMA.
Venue: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Presented by: The Museum of Modern Art
With support from: Romanian Cultural Institute
