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:

1:30 p.m: Doc Fortnight Shorts 2: The Music of Sound

Isis & Osiris. 2024. USA. Directed by Ephraim Asili. 18 min. New York premiere.
Commissioned for the Hammer Museum’s new exhibition Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal, Ephraim Asili’s Isis & Osiris reimagines the jazz legend’s experimentations with harp, the instrument that her husband, John Coltrane, bequeathed to her upon his death in 1967 and that became essential to her spiritual and musical evolution. Alice Coltrane’s legacy, and her recently restored concert grand crowned harp, live on in the work of the award-winning contemporary musician Brandee Younger.

On the Battlefield. 2024. USA. Directed by Little Egypt Collective, Theresa Delsoin, Lisa Marie Malloy, J.P. Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker. Courtesy Cinema Guild. 13 min.
“In the southern Illinois region of Little Egypt, a sound recordist revisits the flat fields where once stood Pyramid Courts, the housing projects that formed the heart of the Black community of his hometown, Cairo. His mic gathers sonic ephemera of past, present and future within the grasses, trees and skies…. On the Battlefield is an overture celebrating the joy and power of Cairo, a town famous for confluences and collisions: between the North and South, the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers, and Black liberation and white supremacy” (Little Egypt Collective).

Tramuntana. 2025. Spain/USA. Directed by Martí Madaula Esquirol. 18 min. World premiere.
“In a remote area of northern Spain, the wind has a name: Tramuntana. Tramuntana takes what it wants—clothes, trees, boats, and the people of the landscape who live with the endless threat of being carried away by its force. This film is a lyrical portrait of this furious wind, woven from the stories passed down by local villagers” (Martí Madaula Esquirol).

MÚSICAS. 2025. Mexico. Directed by Lila Avilés. Courtesy RIMOWA and GEWA. 31 min. World premiere.
Lila Avilés, the award-winning writer-director of Tótem and The Chambermaid, follows Leticia Gallardo and her all-female band Mujeres del Viento Florido, musicians from more than 60 Indigenous communities across Mexico who travel from the mountainous region of Tlahuitoltepec to Oaxaca and Mexico City bringing joyous popular music and a kind of brassy defiance of centuries of persecution.

Program 82 min.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

4:00 p.m: Henry Fonda for President

2024. Austria/Germany. Directed by Alexander Horwath. Courtesy The Film Desk. New York premiere. In English, German; English subtitles. 184 min.

The story of Henry Fonda, both on screen and off, is the story of the United States. It’s a story of democratic yearnings and violent shortcomings, traceable not only in the actor’s legendary portrayals of pioneering settler (Drums Along the Mohawk), migrant sharecropper (The Grapes of Wrath), gullible heir (The Lady Eve), and president (Young Mr. Lincoln, Fail-Safe), but also in his own life as the descendant of a Dutch family in pre-colonial New York, and as a witness to watershed events of the 20th century: the Omaha Race Riots of 1919, the war in the Pacific, the civil rights struggle, and the ascendance of another actor, Ronald Reagan, at the climax of the Cold War. “His face is a picture of opposites in conflict,” John Steinbeck once remarked, and indeed Fonda, perhaps more than any other actor of his generation, brought a sense of moral anguish to nearly every role he played, whether victims of injustice (You Only Live Once, The Wrong Man), or messengers of salvation (My Darling Clementine, 12 Angry Men) and terror (The Ox-Bow Incident, Once Upon a Time in ​t​he West). Tracing the entwined, complex trajectories of an actor and his nation in Hollywood movie clips, recorded interviews, and a cross-country pilgrimage to significant landmarks, Alexander Horwath—together with Michael Palm and Regina Schlagnitweit—has created a magisterial work of cultural history.

Followed by a conversation with Alexander Horwath

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2