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: So Close, So Far and Field Recording

So Close, So Far. 2025. China. Directed by Zhu Yudi. World premiere. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 98 min.

Produced by Ying Liang (Taking Father Home) and Richard Liang (The Road), Zhu Yudi’s almost painfully riveting debut feature chronicles the life of a gambler—the filmmaker’s own father—as he casts his family into spiraling debt with each new “can’t fail” investment in Chinese building construction. Zhu’s documentary project holds the promise of forgiveness and reconciliation, but as his father’s estrangement from his wife and sons grows increasingly acrimonious and desperate, one is left wondering about the countless other families who have become casualties of China’s real estate bubble.

Field Recording. 2024. USA. Written and directed by Quinne Larsen. New York premiere. In English, Chinuk Wawa. 2 min.

“A meandering joke about three dreams” involving seashells, uncertainty, and the Chinuk language, this collaboration between two LA-based cartoonists, musicians, and animation filmmakers just made its debut at Sundance.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

4:30 p.m: Doc Fortnight Shorts 1: Abstraction as Apprehension

Abstraction as Apprehension. 2025. USA. Directed by Amy Sillman. 1 min.
Published in the Washington Post on August 9, 2024—just three months before the presidential election—this animation, made from cut-up ink drawings by the painter Amy Sillman and set to a foreboding score by Marina Rosenfeld, imagines summer as a time of “apprehension,” a time when, as Sillman observes, “roses bloom but their thorns also *****.”

Manal Issa, 2024. 2025. Lebanon/USA. Directed by Elisabeth Subrin. 10 min. World premiere.
Reuniting Elisabeth Subrin with the Lebanese-French actress Manal Issa (a collaborator on Subrin’s award-winning short film Maria Schneider, 1983 and gallery installation The Listening Takes), this pendant work thrums with tension and political urgency as the artists react to the devastating crisis of the Middle East and to the experience of being silenced.

Al Basateen (The Orchards). 2025. France. Directed by Antoine Chapon. 24 min. North American premiere.
Ten years after the civil war in Syria, in the face of a new urban project built on historical erasure, two displaced Syrian residents recall the vibrant community and orchards of Basateen al-Razi, a Damascus neighborhood that was destroyed by armed forces in 2015 as punishment for the community’s uprising against the Assad regime.

The Cavalry. 2024. Canada/USA/Israel. Directed by Alina Orlov. 17 min. New York premiere.
Intending to document public protests against the Israeli government in September 2023, Alina Orlov discovers a facility for the training of Israeli police horses, and out of this creates a subtly layered, provocative meditation on obedience and subjugation.

Who Loves the Sun. 2024. Canada. Directed by Arshia Shakiba. 19 min. New York premiere.
In northern Syria, a land laid waste by civil war, Mahmood oversees a dangerous makeshift refinery operation that generates fuel and income for the displaced population, providing transportation, heating, and cooking.

HABĀ. 2024. Austria/Spain. Directed by Helin Çelik. 23 min. New York premiere.
HABĀ opens in darkness, a darkness pierced by the agitated voice of a young woman, Sahar, who fears for her life. Suddenly, as the recorded phone conversation cuts off, we are led to understand that Sahar has disappeared. Searching for the traces she has left behind, Helin Çelik, a Kurdish artist based in Austria, honors Sahar’s memory, and that of so many other victims of femicide and honor killings, in her stirring, poetic essay.

Program 94 min.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

7:00 p.m: Europe’s New Faces

2025. France/Italy/Switzerland/USA. Directed by Sam Abbas. World premiere. In English, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali; English subtitles. 159 min.

Sam Abbas’s extraordinarily moving Europe’s New Faces confronts the humanitarian crisis of African and South Asian refugees and asylum seekers adrift both in the Mediterranean Sea and in the legal limbo of the EU’s broken immigration system. Four years in the making and woven together with music by Bertrand Bonello (Beast, Nocturama), the film relates intimate stories of tragedy and hope as Abbas charts the migrants’ flight from Libya (and from the horrors of torture, rape, and slavery), across dangerous waters on a makeshift boat (where they risk drowning or detention), to forge a fragile but vibrant new community in a Paris squat (where they face eviction or worse).

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

7:30 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