With a literary background, he decided to go into cinema in 1990 and made Videograms of a Revolution (1992), co-directed with Harun Farocki, which became a landmark film on the relationship between political power and the media in Europe at the end of the Cold War. His second film, Out of the Present (1995), tells the story of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent ten months aboard the MIR space station while, back on earth, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010) closes his trilogy about the end of communism. He has also made two commissioned works for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art: 2 Pasolini (short film, 2000–2021) and Unknown Quantity (2005).