TWST: Things We Said Today

In this form-defying documentary, immerse yourself in the heady optimism of being young in New York on a day when The Beatles seemed to herald a thrilling future.

August 1965: The Beatles are set to play Shea Stadium in New York, cresting a global wave of teenage fandom. New York is also hosting the World’s Fair, an older but still enthusiastic celebration of humanity’s achievements and innovations. And bubbling anger at police violence has just sparked the Watts Riots on the other side of the country. Budding writer Geoffrey and Beatlemaniac Judith – who’s attending the concert with her two friends – roam the summery city, their innocent hopes unfurling over fraught undercurrents of social change.

Six decades later, Beatlemania is one of pop culture’s most exhaustively mined subjects. Can anything new be said now? Named after a 1964 Beatles song that Paul McCartney described as “future nostalgia”, this film by Romanian documentarian Andrei Ujică (The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, MIFF 2010) refuses both fond, familiar nostalgia tourism and ‘never-before-seen’ additions to Beatles lore. Instead, Ujică delivers an eccentric montage of news footage and home movies, which are overlaid with hand-drawn animation to ghostly effect, as his own poetic writing intersperses with the words of real-life essayist Geoffrey O’Brien and novelist Judith Kristen. It all comes together as a groundbreaking time capsule – one that transports viewers to a generation-defining future–present moment shimmering with possibilities.

“Lovely, eye-opening, complexly experiential (and experimental) … a movie that’s dreamy and clear-eyed at once.” – The Hollywood Reporter