A central figure of European documentary, Andrei Ujică (Timișoara, 1951) presents himself as an author. He thinks and writes with images, interrogates history through the materiality of the archive, and works with editing as an essayistic precision tool. His cinema exposes how technical mediation conditions public perception and the writing of time. In 2025, Porto/Post/Doc dedicates a full retrospective to his work, underlining the relevance of his thought in a context marked by information wars and growing skepticism toward archives.
Ujică’s trajectory begins in literature, with studies in Timișoara, Bucharest, and Heidelberg, and consolidates in cinema from 1990 onwards. His research articulates politics, spectacle, and collective memory. The archive ceases to be a mere source and becomes an object of study and a field of dispute. Each shot is questioned, displaced, and re-edited until its internal tensions are exposed. This authorial methodology brings his work closer to a critical laboratory, where history is read through its own visual traces.
The turning point comes with “Videograms of a Revolution” (1992), co-directed by Harun Farocki. The work reconstructs the Romanian Revolution from television broadcasts, amateur videos, and official recordings, showing that the conquest of power is also fought on the screen. In “Out of the Present” (1995), cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev’s mission becomes a philosophical experience. Seen from orbit, the dissolution of the Soviet Union appears as a historical interval and as a vertigo of time. “The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu” (2010) closes the trilogy of Romanian communism by portraying a regime solely through protocol images, revealing in its ceremonial the regime’s structural failure. “Unknown Quantity” (2005) deepens the reflection on image, catastrophe, and writing. “TWST – Things We Said Today” (2024) reinscribes the popular memory of the 1960s and observes cultural transformation through music, world fairs, riots, and promises. In 2025, the retrospective will also present “2 Pasolini”, reaffirming Ujică’s ability to cross artistic and political genealogies through montage.
Ujică’s work asserts itself as an intellectual practice in dialogue with philosophy and image theory. Over the years, the author has held regular public conversations with Peter Sloterdijk in different cities and institutions, including the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Triennale Milano, and the University of Timișoara. He has taken part in debates with Boris Groys, in trialogues with Peter Weibel and Sloterdijk, and in discussions mediated by Antonio Spadaro. This trajectory also intersects with meetings and conferences that brought together thinkers such as Hans Belting, Markus Gabriel, Marie-José Mondzain, Stephen Mulhall, and Thomas Wartenberg. These moments confirm Ujică’s place at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and media critique, and highlight a body of work that treats the archive as a political gesture and montage as a form of knowledge.
Alongside the presentation of his works, this retrospective also includes a personal choice by the author, “My Home Is Copacabana”, by Arne Sucksdorff, which sheds light on Ujică’s connection with a documentary tradition attentive to childhood and to the city as spaces of discovery and as devices for staging reality.
Beyond his artistic trajectory, Ujică maintains a constant pedagogical commitment as a professor at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe and founder of the ZKM’s Institute of Cinema. His teaching practice reverberates in his films. Each work functions as an open seminar on ways of seeing, preserving, and reinterpreting the world. To present this retrospective in 2025 is more than to celebrate an authorial journey; it is to propose to the public an exercise in media literacy and citizenship. The program will feature the author’s presence in Porto for a public conversation on cinema, philosophy, and culture.
FOCUS ANDREI UJICĂ
2 Pasolini, Andrei Ujică
DOC, 2000, FRA, 11’
Out of the Present, Andrei Ujică
DOC, 1995, DEU, 96’
Trailer
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Andrei Ujică
DOC, 2010, ROU, 187’
Trailer
TWST – Things We Said Today, Andrei Ujică
DOC, 2024, FRA, ROU, 86’
Trailer
Unknown Quantity, Andrei Ujică
DOC, 2005, FRA, DEU, 67’
Trailer
Videograms of a Revolution, Harun Farocki, Andrei Ujică
DOC, 1992, DEU, ROU, 106’
Trailer
Carte Blanche
My Home Is Copacabana, Arne Sucksdorff
FIC, DOC, 1965, SWE, 88’
Trailer
