Andrei Ujică / France, Romania / 86’ / 2024

TWST begins with the Beatles’ arrival in New York City for the concert at Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965, but the tale of those three mythical days, when the city was literally invaded by thousands of the band’s fans, is only a starting point to take the viewer elsewhere, to an America disrupted by deep social rifts and animated by unstoppable currents of change. The frame of reference gradually expands, the events of ’65 overlapping: the New York World’s Fair, Watts’ riots coming from the East Coast via television. A cast of thousands is evoked by the filmic image: they circulate as ghostly, disembodied presences, figures of vanished youth who still inhabit these places, whose raw photographic textures confirm their reality.
A journey into the hidden core of that world both vanished and palpably present.

Directed by Andrei Ujică
Screenplay by Andrei Ujică
The screenplay contains fragments from Ujică’s short story Isabela, the Friend of the Butterflies; from Geoffrey O’Brien’s autofiction short story and Judith Kristen’s diary
Screenplay Consultant Carmen Eberhat
Editing and Sound design Dana Bunescu
Head of research Anna Kuhlig
Sound (recording and mixing) Dana Bunescu,Guillaume Solignat
Drawings by Yann Kebbi
VFX Supervisor Olga Avramov
With the voices of Tommy McCabe, Therese Azzara, Shea Grant, Shelly Sarah McCluskey
Produced by Ronald Chammah, Anamaria Antoci, Andrei Ujică
Executive Producers Hervé Chandès, Kent Jones, Anna Kuhlig, Nouredine Essadi, Anda Ionescu
World Sales MInerva Pictures, Monica Ciarli

Andrei Ujică
Andrei Ujică was born on November 13, 1951, in Timișoara, Romania. With a background in literature, Ujică decided in 1990 to pursue filmmaking and made his debut with Videograms of a Revolution (1992), co-directed with Harun Farocki, which became a landmark film about the relationship between political power and the media in Europe at the end of the Cold War. His second film, Out of the Present (1995), tells the story of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent ten months aboard the Mir space station while on Earth the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Out of the Present has been compared to such iconic titles in film history as 2001: A Space Odyssey or Solaris, and is famous for being one of the most recognized documentary films of the 1990s. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), widely considered a monumental achievement, concludes his trilogy devoted to the end of communism. Andrei Ujică also made two commissioned works for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain: 2 Pasolini (short, 2000/2021) and Unknown Quantity, with Paul Virilio and Svetlana Alexievitch.