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:

4:00 p.m: Doc Fortnight Shorts 3: Manifest

Night Fishing with Ancestors. 2023. Australia. Directed by Karrabing Film Collective. 24 min. US premiere.
The artists of Karrabing, a grassroots media group operating out of Belyuen, an Indigenous community in Australia’s Northern Territory, bring a kind of knowing and defiant irreverence to their retelling and refashioning of historical narratives. In Night Fishing with Ancestors, they relate a tale of first encounters, when in the early-mid 18th century Makassar traders set sail from Indonesia to the shores of northern Australia in search of trepang (sea cucumbers), a coveted delicacy, and there made contact with Aboriginal peoples, a momentous and relatively peaceful encounter that left both cultures forever changed. What if history ended there, the film asks, before Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770 brought the cruelties of European colonialism in his wake?

Give it Back: Stage Theory. 2023. USA. Directed by New Red Order. 6 min. New York premiere.
First presented in the St. Louis art triennial Counterpublic, a civically minded exercise in historical and cultural consciousness raising, the Indigenous public secret society New Red Order’s Give It Back: Stage Theory draws on the panoramic paintings of 19th-century exhibition dioramas and on efforts to restore what remains of Sugarloaf Mound, the last intact Native American mound in the region, much of which was razed to clear space for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis World’s Fair) and its wildly popular Igorot Village, where “savage natives” from the Philippines were put on view.

The Volcano Manifesto. 2025. USA. Directed by Cauleen Smith. 50 min. World premiere.
Presented as a trilogy for the first time, Cauleen Smith’s The Volcano Manifesto brings together three recent films—My Caldera (2022), Mines to Caves (2023), and The Deep West Assembly (2024)—in an astonishingly ambitious, densely woven meditation on geological and cinematic time, on the wild abyss of volcanoes and the womb of mines and caves (pregnant with meaning!), and on the prelapsarian and the postdiluvian (Deluzian?).

Program 80 min.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

6:30 p.m: Endless Cookie

2025. Canada. Written and directed by Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver. New York premiere. 97 min.

A marvelously inventive throwback to underground comix of Kim Deitch and the antic handdrawn animation of Sally Cruikshank and Suzan Pitt, Endless Cookie takes us on a wild ride with the half-brothers Scriver—Peter is the Indigenous kid, Seth the white one—as they journey back to 1980s Toronto and the icily remote regions of Shamattawa, a First Nations community in northern Manitoba, in search of family ties and divides. The hilarious tales, many of them involving chaotic menageries of caribou, dogs, and kids, come fast and furious. But don’t be fooled by the Scrivers’ candy-coated, polymorphous cartooning and “aw shucks” narration, original though they may be, for Endless Cookie is a pretty damning indictment of the way Canada treats its Indigenous peoples.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

7:00 p.m: Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued and 历历如画 (14 Paintings)

Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. 2025. USA. Directed by Julian Castronovo. North American premiere. In English, French; English subtitles. 78 min.

One of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2024, Julian Castronovo has come out of the gates hot. A graduate of CalArts and Brown (where he graduated from the same semiotics program as Todd Haynes), the Wisconsin-born writer and director turned $900 and a dream into this globetrotting metafiction that’s equal parts Sebald, Pynchon, Welles and Chandler—all while surfing on a computer in his bedroom. The real-life case of Eli Sakhai, a New York gallerist imprisoned for masterminding an elaborate art forgery scheme, is merely the springboard for Castronovo’s own flights of fancy, which involve a doppelgänger, a Chinese performance artist, plenty of red herrings, and a rather ingenious questioning of signs and signifiers, what’s real and what’s fake, as the filmmaker forges meaning through appropriation, reenactment, invention, and “other forms of duplicity.”

历历如画 (14 Paintings). 2023. China. Directed by Dongnan Chen. In Chinese; English subtitles. 24 min.

Responding to the latest fads in the contemporary art market, China refashioned the village of Dafen, once the go-to place for convincing replicas and forgeries of Western masterpieces produced on an industrial scale, into a hothouse of artistic originality, selling aspiring collectors on custom-made paintings to suit their every need, whether for boardroom, living room, or laundromat. Dongnan Chen documents this remarkable trend in a series of 14 tableaux, questioning the freedoms of Chinese artists and consumers alike.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2