Andrei Ujică at The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art announces a film series, Andrei Ujic, from September 11–16, 2026.

This is the first complete North American retrospective of Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujic, one of contemporary cinema's finest film essayists. Whether in confronting his own nation's dark history or in evoking his first magical encounters with the Beatles and World Cup football, Ujic—who will be present to introduce many of the screenings—interrogates the politics of image making and history writing, and the ways in which the popular culture of songs, sports, and movies insinuates itself into our collective unconscious, defines our national identities, and shapes our memories, desires, and apprehension of ourselves and the world around us.

Highlights include the filmmaker presenting a work-in-progress excerpt from his latest film, Matches and Days, a meditation on how World Cup football has shaped the rhythms of his life and those of his son and grandchildren. Ujic also presents his most recent feature, TWST/Things We Said Today (2024), a personal reminiscence created in collaboration with writer Geoffrey O'Brien, about the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium. At the core of his trilogy on the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ujic's The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceauescu (2010) stitches together 24 years of state propaganda images into an expansive vision of a nation in thrall to a cult leader. In his collaboration with Harun Farocki, Videograms of a Revolution (1992), official broadcasts seem an impotent sham in the face of eyewitness accounts of the dictator's demise by ordinary citizens wielding video cameras. Out of the Present (1995) chronicles the orbital isolation of a Russian cosmonaut at the Mir space station while the Soviet Union imploded back home.