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: 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 2

4:00 p.m: Šedá zóna and Contractions

Šedá zóna (Grey Zone). 2024. Slovakia. Directed by Daniela Meressa Rusnoková. North American premiere. In Slovak; English subtitles. 75 min.

In Grey Zone, the Slovakian filmmaker and photographer Daniela Meressa Rusnoková transmutes the unspokenly common and often traumatic reality of premature birth into a deeply poetic work of art. Interweaving her own experiences of fear, shame, despair, and hope with those of other mothers in similarly anguished circumstances, Rusnoková offers a complex, even wrenching meditation on a woman’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy, and on the pervasive fear and neglect in society of children born prematurely or with special needs or disabilities.

Contractions. 2024. USA. Directed by Lynne Sachs. 12 min.

Fourteen women and their male allies, their backs to the camera, stand in full force outside a Memphis health clinic that can no longer provide abortion services following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. On the soundtrack, an expert obstetrician-gynecologist and an anonymous activist bear witness to the fearsome uncertainties and dangers that lie ahead.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

4:00 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 1

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.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

7:00 p.m: Middletown

2025. USA. Directed by Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine. New York premiere. 113 min.

Fresh from Sundance and the centerpiece of Doc Fortnight 2025, this latest documentary by the award-winning creators of Boys State (2020) and Girls State (2024) follows a group of muckraking high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal in Upstate New York in the early 1990s and made national news with their DIY video exposé Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed. Led by Fred Isseks, the teacher who put a powerful new investigative tool—the camcorder—in their hands, the students tenaciously followed leads, coaxed whistleblowers, and confronted stonewalling officials into revealing a corrupt criminal pact between local government and organized crime. Miraculously, Isseks safeguarded the raw (and sometimes raucous) footage from Garbage, Gangsters, and Greed in his basement, inspiring Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (who were themselves teenagers discovering documentary filmmaking in the early 1990s) to reunite the students some 30 years later.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1