TWST / Things We Said Today

It’s August 1965, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo have descended upon New York for a sold-out concert at Queens’ massive Shea Stadium. Throngs of young superfans stricken with Beatlemania tear through the streets of Manhattan for a glimpse of the Liverpudlians from their hotel room window. But this tells only one part of the story of that hot summer weekend in the metropolis. More than a decade in the making, Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică’s first feature since the monumental The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (NYFF48) finds the found-footage maestro fabricating a fresh kind of city symphony. This variegated rendering of New York and its people, from Harlem to Jones Beach, from the mundane to the magical, is made up entirely of archival material, from news station broadcasts to personal 8mm film diaries. Ujică’s fanciful documentary is also a work of imagination, using superimposed animated drawings (by French artist Yann Kebbi) and descriptive voice-over (from personal writings by Geoffrey O’Brien and Judith Kristen, and Ujică’s own poetry) to memorialize this vanished moment in history with poignant, distinctive flair.

Special thanks to Villa Albertine for their generous support of French cinema.