TWST: Things We Said Today Brings The Beatles’ Shea Stadium Era Back To Life At MIFF

The Beatles may have broken up more than half a century ago, but the mythology surrounding them shows no sign of slowing down. At this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, one of the most talked-about titles was TWST: Things We Said Today, a new documentary from Romanian filmmaker Andrei Ujică.

Unlike Apple Corps-approved projects such as The Beatles Anthology or Peter Jackson’s Get Back, TWST arrives firmly in the “unauthorised” category. That might sound like a handicap, but in Ujică’s hands, it becomes the film’s strength. Rather than chasing down rare Beatles footage or trying to patch together rights-free performances, he shifts the focus outward, onto New York City itself during August 1965, the weekend The Beatles conquered Shea Stadium.

The film takes its title from Paul McCartney’s 1964 composition “Things We Said Today,” a song often read as a reflection on memory, change and future nostalgia. That theme becomes the anchor for what Ujică has created, not a straightforward band documentary, but an atmospheric “time capsule” that captures the cultural weather of mid-60s America.

The centrepiece is, of course, The Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert of 15 August 1965, the first rock show ever held in a stadium and a benchmark in the evolution of popular music. But TWST resists the temptation to retell the well-worn story of that gig in a linear fashion. Instead, Ujică paints the picture of what it felt like to be alive in New York across those days. He uses a patchwork of TV broadcasts, fan-shot home movies, radio snippets and even diary entries to capture the sense of anticipation, chaos and cultural change surrounding The Beatles’ arrival.

The Fab Four remain present, screaming girls outside the Warwick Hotel, fleeting newsreel flashes, snippets of Shea, but TWST is equally about what else was happening in America. The optimism of the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair contrasts sharply with the anger of the Watts uprising in Los Angeles, which exploded just days before The Beatles hit the stage in New York.

That juxtaposition, utopia versus unrest, the world’s biggest pop group versus a country in turmoil, gives TWST a dimension beyond nostalgia. It’s less about the band’s setlist, more about the cultural shockwaves radiating from their presence.

Unlike most Beatles documentaries, TWST avoids the usual parade of celebrity commentators and surviving insiders. There are no Paul or Ringo interviews here, and no recycled talking heads from the Apple archives.

Instead, Ujică works with voices from the time. The film is built around text from novelist Judith Kristen, remembered here as “Beatlemaniac Judith,” and critic Geoffrey O’Brien, a “budding writer” wandering through the city during that Beatles weekend. Their reflections, read aloud in English, French and German voiceover, are mixed with Ujică’s own writing, giving the piece a layered, almost poetic feel.

By keeping the commentary rooted in lived experience rather than retrospective analysis, Ujică pulls the viewer back to the mid-60s, allowing the moment to breathe.

Stylistically, TWST is a world away from the pristine archival restoration of Get Back. This is collage filmmaking: scratchy black-and-white TV feeds, fan footage, and animation sketched delicately over celluloid frames. The drawings don’t decorate so much as haunt the material, reinforcing the theme of memory reshaped over time.

At 86 minutes, the pacing is deliberate. The tension builds as fans gather, media frenzy kicks in and the city buzzes with Beatlemania. When Shea arrives, Ujică doesn’t linger. We see enough to register the scale, 55,600 fans losing their minds in a baseball stadium, and then the film drifts back to the wider world, as if reminding us that The Beatles weren’t just the biggest act in music; they were a flashpoint in a much larger cultural shift.

So where does TWST sit in the crowded field of Beatles documentaries?

For authorised films, the hierarchy is clear. Anthology remains the definitive career-spanning chronicle, and Peter Jackson’s Get Back set a new standard for immersive, archival storytelling.

But when it comes to the unofficial side, TWST is a cut above.

Compare it to Seth Swirsky’s Beatles Stories (2011), an affectionate series of celebrity recollections. Charming, yes, but anecdotal. Or Alan G. Parker’s It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper & Beyond, which tried to piece together the 1966–67 story but couldn’t shake the limitations of rights issues. Both deliver content but lack the artistic vision.

TWST, on the other hand, never tries to compete for access it doesn’t have. Instead, it builds a completely different experience — one that feels fresh, even six decades after Shea. It joins the rare company of Beatles films that succeed without Apple’s blessing, not by being exhaustive, but by being inventive.

Against the usual “unauthorised” budget DVDs, the sort that recycle public-domain interviews and newsreels, TWST isn’t even in the same conversation. This is a proper piece of cinema, not a cash-in.

At MIFF, TWST: Things We Said Today stood out precisely because it refused to play by the rules of the traditional music doc. Ujică isn’t interested in “never-before-seen” Beatles footage, as the festival notes rightly point out, there probably isn’t much left to unearth. What he offers instead is perspective.

For Beatles fans expecting wall-to-wall music, TWST might frustrate. There are only a handful of minutes featuring the band themselves. But for audiences curious about how the world looked, sounded and felt around the Beatles at their most pivotal moment, this is something special.

The film is immersive, poetic and occasionally haunting. It doesn’t just tell you what happened at Shea Stadium; it lets you feel what it meant.

If Get Back is the ultimate authorised deep dive into the band’s inner world, TWST is the best of the outsider accounts, a time machine back to August 1965, when the world’s biggest band collided with a country on the cusp of change.

https://miff.com.au/program/film/twst-things-we-said-today

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Tagged as: 60s, Andrei Ujică, MIFF, movies, Things We Said Today, TWST, UK