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:

6:30 p.m: Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed)

2024. Argentina/Portugal/Spain. Directed by Hernán Rosselli. New York premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 100 min.

“I come from a vertiginous country, where the lottery is a major part of reality,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once observed. Few are untouched by the quinela, the clandestine lottery system, which has operated as a shadow economy since Argentina’s very founding, lining the pockets of politicians and police and lifting some families out of poverty while throwing others deeply into debt. Director Hernán Rosselli’s own mother, like so many divorcées and widows with young children, once worked in this lottery system, and this experience was the spur to his portrait of one influential family, the Felpetos, who are riven by paranoia and recrimination amid rumors of an imminent raid on their underground sports-betting operation. The best true-crime stories are always told by unreliable narrators—the self-aggrandizing criminals themselves—and Rosselli has woven together these embellishments with home movie and CCTV footage to create a darkling vision of Borgesian delusion.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

7:00 p.m: John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office

2025. USA. Directed by Michael Almereyda, Courtney Stephens. Narrated by Chloë Sevigny. North American premiere. 90 min.

The French director Georges Franju, creator of fascinating, surreal hybrids of science and fiction like Blood of the Beasts, once remarked, “I have always been attracted by emanations of strangeness.” Michael Almereyda (Tesla, Experimenter, Hamlet) and Courtney Stephens (Invention, Terra Femme, Mixed Signals) prove worthy heirs to this seductively elusive form of cinema as they delve into the weird and mysterious world of John Lilly through historical footage, home movies, pop culture, and interviews with his contemporaries in science and art. An iconoclastic scientist whose experiments with dolphins and hallucinogens (LSD and ketamine) opened new pathways to consciousness as well as an understanding of the rights of cetaceans as sentient beings, Lilly also had a penchant for showmanship and fantasy that would lead, later in life, to episodes of self-destruction and folly. In his search for novel forms of communication and otherworldly experience, Lilly invented the isolation tank and, partnering with the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, famously presided over experiments involving a female researcher with a young male dolphin in a partially flooded house—investigations that inspired two very different Hollywood movies​, The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States​, as well as more serious inquiries into neurobiology and linguistics. ​Through Almereyda and Stephens’s own meeting of the minds​—and against the “shifting backdrops of 1950s Cold War military science, the drug-infused counterculture of the ’60s, and the environmental vanguard of the ’70s”—we come to recognize ​in John Lilly’s life and legacy​ a collective dreamscape of the 20th century.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2