Now in its 24th year, MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight festival presents adventurous new nonfiction and hybrid fiction cinema from around the world.

Festival Schedule:

1:00 p.m: Opt ilustrate din Lumea Ideală (Eight Postcards from Utopia) and Sleep #2

Opt ilustrate din Lumea Ideală (Eight Postcards from Utopia). 2024. Romania. Directed by Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz. US premiere. In Romanian; English subtitles. 71 min.

What happens after the decline and fall of a civilization? In their wickedly satirical montage of Romanian television commercials that were broadcast in the years following Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu’s 1989 executions by firing squad, Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Bad Luck Banging, or Loony ****) and the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz have created a rhapsody of materialist kitsch. Consumers in the post-communist era, sold on visions of Romania’s glorious empirical past and gilded capitalist future, are thrown into a Wild West of get-rich-quick schemes, shiny new toys, and economic shock therapy.

Sleep #2. 2024. Romania. Directed by Radu Jude. No dialogue. 62 min.

Long obsessed with Andy Warhol as a filmmaker, Conceptual artist, and pop-culture phenom, Radu Jude—in his customary irreverent fashion—gathered up a year’s worth of webcam footage from Warhol’s gravesite to create this threnody of mourning in America. The film is a brilliant Warholian experiment like no other, tapping into the artist’s voyeuristic fascination with life caught unawares (Sleep), transcendence (********), and death at its most sensational or ignominious (Electric Chair, Tunafish Disaster), while also finding new currents of vicariousness and paranoia in our age of ubiquitous social media and surveillance.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

4:30 p.m: Blum: Gospodari svoje budućnosti (Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny)

2024. Bosnia/Herzegovina. Directed by Jasmila Žbanić. North American premiere. In Bosnian, English; English subtitles. 76 min.

Having illuminated Serbian war crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001 in such dramatic fiction films as Grbavica (2006) and her Academy Award–nominated Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020), Jasmila Žbanić now turns to the documentary form to shed light on an extraordinary historical figure, Emerik Blum. A Bosnian Jew of Hungarian descent, Blum managed in 1944 to escape two of the most notorious concentration camps run by the Croatian fascist Ustaše. He thrived during the early postwar years of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia by ascending to top ministerial positions in the power sector, leading him to become the founding director of Energoinvest, one of Europe’s largest (and still-preeminent) engineering conglomerates. Fascinating archival footage and contemporary testimonials in Žbanić’s film reveal Blum to have been a humane boss and a shrewd diplomat, bringing technological advancements and efficiencies together with a considerably profitable understanding of how Yugoslavia’s non-alignment policies could serve his company’s international success. In doing so, Blum also helped open to the world a nation that was caught in the geopolitical rivalries of the Cold War. Shortly before his death in 1984, Blum was elected mayor of Sarajevo, and his reputation as an influential philanthropist succeeds him.

Followed by a conversation with Jasmila Žbanić

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

6:30 p.m: An Unfinished Film

2024. Singapore/Germany. Directed by Lou Ye. Courtesy Film Movement. New York premiere. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 105 min.

The most radically ambitious feature to come out of Cannes this past year, Lou Ye’s An Unfinished Film is nothing less than a reinvention of all the Chinese filmmaker’s work to date, his response to a world suddenly suspended in time by the outbreak of COVID and increasingly mediated through digital interfaces. Ostensibly the story of a movie crew trapped in a hotel in Wuhan during the earliest days of the pandemic—the images of the phantom city under siege are hauntingly unnerving, to be sure—An Unfinished Film creates multiple meanings through layer upon layer of reality (films within films within films). It draws on cell phone, CCTV, and news footage; outtakes and on-set documentary material from Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000), Spring Fever (2009), Mystery (2012), and The Shadow Play (2018); and real-time responses to the unfolding global health crisis, to become a meditation—sometimes playful, sometimes unsettling, always subversive—on invention, improvisation, and chance both in the creative process and in life.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

7:00 p.m: Doc Fortnight Shorts 1: Abstraction as Apprehension

Abstraction as Apprehension. 2025. USA. Directed by Amy Sillman. 1 min.
Published in the Washington Post on August 9, 2024—just three months before the presidential election—this animation, made from cut-up ink drawings by the painter Amy Sillman and set to a foreboding score by Marina Rosenfeld, imagines summer as a time of “apprehension,” a time when, as Sillman observes, “roses bloom but their thorns also *****.”

Manal Issa, 2024. 2025. Lebanon/USA. Directed by Elisabeth Subrin. 10 min. World premiere.
Reuniting Elisabeth Subrin with the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa (a collaborator on Subrin’s award-winning short film Maria Schneider, 1983 and gallery installation The Listening Takes), this pendant work thrums with tension and political urgency as the artists react to the devastating crisis of the Middle East and to the experience of being silenced.

Al Basateen (The Orchards). 2025. France. Directed by Antoine Chapon. 24 min. North American premiere.
Ten years after the civil war in Syria, in the face of a new urban project built on historical erasure, two displaced Syrian residents recall the vibrant community and orchards of Basateen al-Razi, a Damascus neighborhood that was destroyed by armed forces in 2015 as punishment for the community’s uprising against the Assad regime.

The Cavalry. 2024. Canada/USA/Israel. Directed by Alina Orlov. 17 min. New York premiere.
Intending to document public protests against the Israeli government in September 2023, Alina Orlov discovers a facility for the training of Israeli police horses, and out of this creates a subtly layered, provocative meditation on obedience and subjugation.

Who Loves the Sun. 2024. Canada. Directed by Arshia Shakiba. 19 min. New York premiere.
In northern Syria, a land laid waste by civil war, Mahmood oversees a dangerous makeshift refinery operation that generates fuel and income for the displaced population, providing transportation, heating, and cooking.

HABĀ. 2024. Austria/Spain. Directed by Helin Çelik. 23 min. New York premiere.
HABĀ opens in darkness, a darkness pierced by the agitated voice of a young woman, Sahar, who fears for her life. Suddenly, as the recorded phone conversation cuts off, we are led to understand that Sahar has disappeared. Searching for the traces she has left behind, Helin Çelik, a Kurdish artist based in Austria, honors Sahar’s memory, and that of so many other victims of femicide and honor killings, in her stirring, poetic essay.

Program 94 min.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2