France, Romania

Documentary

TWST takes as its starting point the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and as its title a Beatles song that already anticipates a time when the present moment will have become a haunting past, neither retrievable nor forgettable. But the frame of reference steadily broadens. Adjacent realities of 1965 are juxtaposed – the New York World’s Fair, the Watts riots filtering through from the East Coast on television. A cast of thousands summoned up – each separate sphere, each 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 that world both gone and palpably present.

Written & directed by: Andrei Ujică
Produced by: Ronald Chammah, Anamaria Antoci, Andrei Ujică
Editing: Dana Bunescu
Sound: Dana Bunescu, Guillaume Solignat
Visual Effects: Olga Avramov
Animation: Yann Kebbi, Olga Avramov

Statement of the director:
There is a sentence in ‘Madame Bovary’ which captures the entire ambition of the book. After Rodolphe’s final refusal, Emma exits the castle filled with deadly despair:
"The earth beneath her feet was more yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her immense brown waves breaking into foam."
When I read it in my teenage years, I was struck by the jubilation Flaubert must’ve felt understanding he’d managed to elevate prose to the heights of great poetry. Then, a question began to take root in my mind: when could cinema reach the complexity of literature? Half a century has passed, and I’ve found only fleeting answers.
Among my high school dreams, though, some were also more accessible: to get to work with a great pop band and to make an American movie. But even so, only 50 years later I dared to make a film around the first concert of the greatest band of all time on Shea Stadium. As I said to the young New Yorkers, the actors whose voices we recorded last Autumn: It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to fulfil your dream, as long as you do it before you forget it.

Production:
Tangaj Production
http://www.tangajproduction.com/

World Sales:
Minerva Pictures
http://www.minervapictures.com/