Andrei Ujica is a Romanian screenwriter and director.

Life and works

Ujica studied literature in Timişoara, Bucharest

Bucharest

Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....

 and Heidelberg

Heidelberg

-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...

. He moved to Germany in 1981. In 1990 he began making films. Together with Harun Farocki, he created "Videograms of a Revolution", a film which has become a standard work in Europe when referring to relationships between political power and the media and the end of the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

, and which was listed by the magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema as one of the top 10 subversive films of all time.

His next work, "Out of the Present", told the story of the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov who spent 10 months on board MIR

Mir

Mir was a space station operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, at first by the Soviet Union and then by Russia. Assembled in orbit from 1986 to 1996, Mir was the first modular space station and had a greater mass than that of any previous spacecraft, holding the record for the...

, while back on Earth, the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 collapsed. The film has been compared to classics such as "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Solaris" and is considered one of the non-fiction cult films of the nineties. His latest work, "Unknown Quantity", creates a fictional conversation between Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military....

 and Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian investigative journalist and prose writer.-Life:Born in the Ukrainian town of Stanislav to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, she grew up in Belarus...

, author of "Voices from Chernobyl", exploring the witness's protocoll and the generation of history into catastrophe.

In 2001 Ujica became a professor for film at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design

Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design

The Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe is a Germany university founded in 1992 by Professor Heinrich Klotz, who also founded its sister institution, the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe...

. He founded the ZKM Film Institute in 2002 and is its director.

Filmography

• 1992: Videograms of a Revolution (director)
• 1992: Kamera und Wirklichkeit (director and screenwriter)
• 1995: Out of the Present (director and screenwriter)
• 2000: 2 Pasolini'
• 2005: Unknown Quantity
• 2010: The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu

External links

• Giuseppe Sedia, Interview with Andrei Ujica (Italian) 09-27-2006.