Andrej Ujica, director , "TWST - Things We Said Today". A snapshot of new York and America in the days Beatles first came to NY in 1965 and changed pop music forever.
“TWST – Things We Know Today“, the documentary by Andrej Ujica, Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival, starts from the Beatles’ arrival in New York for the famous concert at Shea Stadium in 1965. From there, an account of America in those years unfolds, through the study of a planetary social phenomenon such as the success of the British band.
Reconstructing the weekend before the concert
The idea was to tell the story of that weekend before the iconic conception at Shea Stadium, to mark the moment when everything changed in the world’s perception of the Beatles and also in the realisation that that new music, that pop, was no longer just a youth phenomenon but embraced all ages.
An element of fiction to better describe the historical moment
Andrej Ujica decides to include a fictional part, of a boy writing a short film, to better crystallise what the spirit of that period was on the part of young people towards this new music that was revolutionising the world, not only music.
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"TWST - Things We Said Today", interview with the director Andrej UjicaAngelo Acerbi
TWST begins with the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium and takes its title from a Beatles song that anticipates a time when the present moment will have become a haunting past, neither retrievable nor forgettable. The frame of reference steadily broadens, juxtaposing adjacent realities of 1965—the New York World’s Fair and the Watts riots filtering through from the East Coast on television. A cast of thousands is summoned—each separate sphere, face, and place given equal weight, each instant a centre. Within these domains, ghostly incorporeal presences circulate, their words audible—figures of vanished youth still inhabiting these locations, whose gritty photographic textures confirm their reality. A journey to the hidden core of a world both gone and palpably present.
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