Matches and Days [excerpt from work in progress]. 2027. Romania. Written and directed by Andrei Ujică. In Romanian; English subtitles. 12 min.
MoMA premieres a work-in-progress excerpt from Andrei Ujică’s latest project, in which the Romanian filmmaker reflects on a lifetime of watching World Cup football and sharing this passion with his son and grandchildren. “Matches and Days will be an intimate and nostalgic cinematic essay, almost like a family album,” Ujică says, “as well as a meditation on football as a mirror of the struggle for the autonomy of art. The narrative will span the peak of the Pelé project, reached in the victorious 1970 final against Italy, and the tragic failure of the next great Brazilian generation centered around Zico, Sócrates, and Falcão in 1982 and 1986.”
TWST / Things We Said Today. 2024. France/Romania. Directed by Andrei Ujică. DCP courtesy Minerva Pictures. In English, French, German; English subtitles. 86 min.
TWST | Things We Said Today is Andrei Ujică’s personal reminiscence, created in collaboration with the writer Geoffrey O’Brien, about a watershed cultural and political moment: the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, which took place against a backdrop of racial upheaval, war, and poverty in the United States. This marked an inflection point in Ujică’s life as a teenager in a Romanian village on the border with Yugoslavia, offering a transformative glimpse of freedom beyond the Iron Curtain and an epiphany about the power of art to transcend the soul-crushing drudgeries, lies, fears, and punishments of life under authoritarian rule. Frenzied images of girls attempting to storm the Beatles’ press conference at the Warwick Hotel in Midtown Manhattan are juxtaposed with television and radio news reports of police brutality and resistance in the poor, neglected Black neighborhoods of Watts and Harlem. This study in jarring contrasts is deepened by 8mm home movies, unearthed by Ujică and his researchers on eBay, of a trio of sheltered white suburban girls visiting the New York World’s Fair on the same grounds as the newly built Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows. Excerpts from Ujică’s own short story, “Isabella, the Friend of the Butterflies”—which the filmmaker wrote as a teenager in thrall to the Beatles’ White Album—and the animated, spectral presence of our two protagonists, a then-17-year-old O’Brien and Judith Kristen, the girl in the home movies, guide us through the wild and wooly summer of ’65.