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:

2:00 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: Monólogo colectivo (Collective Monologue)

2024. Argentina/UK. Directed by Jessica Sarah Rinland. With Macarena Santa María Lloydi, María Jose Micale, Alicia Delgado. Courtesy Grasshopper Films. US premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 104 min.

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue is that rarest of breeds, humble yet imaginative, as it depicts the kinship between caregivers and animals in Argentina’s zoos and wildlife sanctuaries. Using a variety of technologies—16mm, surveillance, and infrared cameras; a symphony of animal and industrial sounds; and historical ephemera—Rinland creates a tactile experience of a cloistered world beset by rapid change. Collective Monologue is also a portrait of the workers who toil in anonymity yet allow themselves to feel all the love, anguish, and responsibility that goes into any meaningful relationship. The history of cinema is littered with attempts to anthropomorphize animals, either by rationalizing their behavior as projections of our own or even by putting words in their mouths. Rinland makes no such arrogant claims to dominion or certitude. Small wonder, then, that Collective Monologue has been a standout at recent festivals, including Locarno, the Viennale, London, and TIFF’s Wavelength section.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

4:30 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 1

6:30 p.m: Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari (Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries)

2024. Italy/Switzerland. Directed by Massimo d’Anolfi, Martina Parenti. North American premiere. In English, German, Italian; English subtitles. 206 min.

Like some modern-day Linnaeus, the Italian filmmaking duo Massimo d’Anolfi and Martina Parenti have created a breathtaking inquiry into humanity’s relationship with the natural world—animals, plants, and minerals—through three distinct storytelling techniques: Bestiaries: Cinema Invents New Cages is a found-footage taxonomy of animals and their treatment throughout the history of cinema; Herbaria: The Cure is an observational documentary about the world’s oldest botanical garden, founded in Padua in 1545, that becomes a hymn to the restorative beauty of plants; and Lapidaries: The Fossils of the Future is a reflection on the role of stones in war, destruction, and memorialization. Some lines of Wordsworth’s poetry come to mind: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

7:30 p.m: B.F. Skinner Plays Himself

2025. USA. Directed by Ted Kennedy. World premiere. 72 min.

In his speculative fiction (the 1948 novel Walden Two), his scientific research, and his use of television as a bully pulpit, the influential behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner warned the world of a dystopia, a clockwork orange, in which humans, lacking true free will, could be conditioned to do evil. In B. F. Skinner Plays Himself, filmmaker Ted Kennedy turns unseen raw footage from a 1975 documentary profile—a documentary that Skinner himself, appearing rather imperious and evasive, derailed by imposing a set of impossible demands—into an ingenious inquiry into what the scientist meant when he said, “If I am right about human behavior, I have written the autobiography of a nonperson.” By the 1950s, the significance of the “Skinner box”—a colloquialism that seemed to induce nausea in the inventor himself—made its way from the Harvard science labs into widespread consciousness: an operant conditioning chamber used to control the behavior of pigeons through a system of rewards and punishments was taken up in popular culture as a catch-all for our own unwitting enslavement to unseen, nefarious puppetmasters who manipulate our beliefs, loyalties, shopping habits, and even the way we raise our children. Was that paranoia…or prophecy?

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1