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:

1:00 p.m: The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 1: The Tightrope Walker

2024. Argentina. Directed by Mariano Llinás. North American premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 73 min.

From the great fabulist Mariano Llinas, the Argentine writer-director-producer-actor who brought us a pair of heroically ambitious mashups of popular movie and literary genres in Extraordinary Stories (2008) and La Flor (2018), comes this equally sly, inventive experiment in epistemological uncertainty. It is a trilogy of films about creativity, friendship, power, kitsch, mythmaking, portraiture, failure, delusion, egos, and alter-egos. Invited by Mondongo, an iconoclastic Argentine art collective named after a colonial-era tripe stew, to document their creation of a baptistry out of colorful plasticine (in The Tightrope Walker), Llinas grows restless, and the collaboration begins to go off the rails as he tries to beat the artists at their own game (in Portrait of Mondongo), taking Johannes Itten’s seminal study of color theory from 1961, the source of Mondongo’s work Baptisterio de los colores, as the inspiration for his own poetic and comedic flights of fancy (in Kunst der Farbe).

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

1:30 p.m: Doc Fortnight Shorts 4: Memory and Desire, Stirring

Prelude. 2025. USA. Directed by Jen DeNike. 6 min. World premiere.
An elegy told in the written letters of three women, family photographs, and images of the lush Scottish landscape, Prelude fixes in celluloid what is lost in memory. Facing her mother’s worsening dementia, the artist Jen DeNike performs a tender mercy by reuniting her, in spirit, with the queer lover with whom she spent an erotic afternoon so long ago.

Blue. 2024. Romania/Portugal/Hungary/Belgium. Directed by Ana Vîjdea. In Romanian, French; English subtitles. 20 min. North American premiere.
Before she became one of Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema in 2017, Ana Vîjdea was a student of the Romanian documentarian Andrei Ujicǎ (TWST: Things We Said Today), who turned her on to making nonfiction and hybrid cinema. Vîjdea’s latest short, Blue, is the claustrophobic portrait of a family smothered by love, featuring Rodica, a Romanian mother who struggles to make ends meet in Belgium and who always knows what’s best for her teenage children.

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday. 2025. USA. Directed by Isaiah Davis. 13 min. World premiere.
In the paintings, sculptures, and video projections of his first solo exhibition, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, at Participant Inc. in 2021, Isaiah Davis used leather, metal, and reclaimed wood, as well as tropes from horrorcore and post punk, to explore themes of machismo, violence, and fetishism. A study on Black masculinity in the Bronx, Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday is his new theatrical reworking of two installations from that show, White American Flag and Yesterday by Boyz II Men, Performed by C.L.I.T.

Freak. 2024. USA. Directed by Claire Barnett. 14 min. US premiere.
Shot in a faux vérité camcorder style that seems to tremble with unease, Freak peers in on a pair of young lovers as they test their faithfulness with an almost religious intensity. What goes on in the privacy of someone else’s bedroom should perhaps be left to the imagination, but Claire Barnett’s voyeuristic camera lets us in on some dirty little secrets.

School of the Dead. 2025. USA. Directed by Hannah Gross. 33 min. World premiere.
Actor and theater artist Hannah Gross (The Mountain, Mindhunter) makes her directing debut with this intimate, elliptical hybrid film starring the documentarian Sierra Pettengill (RIOTSVILLE, USA). About their collaboration they observe, “‘We Need a Dead(wo)man to Begin.’ Thus opens the first section of Helene Cixous’ guide to writing. It is an injunction heeded in School of the Dead: a story taught by Sierra’s mother, Hannah’s grandmother, the writer Clarice Lispector, performance artist Mary Overlie, and one of the world’s largest reserves of precambrian fossils. School of the Dead was written and filmed collaboratively in Special Areas 2, Alberta, Canada. Sierra is an outsider here. Her presence explained through loss; grief’s liminal space made literal.”

Program 86 min.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

3:30 p.m: The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 2: Portrait of Mondongo

2024. Argentina. Directed by Mariano Llinás. North American premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 124 min.

From the great fabulist Mariano Llinas, the Argentine writer-director-producer-actor who brought us a pair of heroically ambitious mashups of popular movie and literary genres in Extraordinary Stories (2008) and La Flor (2018), comes this equally sly, inventive experiment in epistemological uncertainty. It is a trilogy of films about creativity, friendship, power, kitsch, mythmaking, portraiture, failure, delusion, egos, and alter-egos. Invited by Mondongo, an iconoclastic Argentine art collective named after a colonial-era tripe stew, to document their creation of a baptistry out of colorful plasticine (in The Tightrope Walker), Llinas grows restless, and the collaboration begins to go off the rails as he tries to beat the artists at their own game (in Portrait of Mondongo), taking Johannes Itten’s seminal study of color theory from 1961, the source of Mondongo’s work Baptisterio de los colores, as the inspiration for his own poetic and comedic flights of fancy (in Kunst der Farbe).

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

4:00 p.m: Who Cares

2024. Belgium/France/Switzerland. Directed by Alexe Poukine. US premiere. In French; English subtitles. 98 min.

Can “bedside manner” be taught? Certainly it’s in increasingly short supply these days, as overworked and underpaid doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are pressured to prioritize profits and efficiency over compassionate care. But while the quaint image of the country doctor may be a thing of the past, an innovative public hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland, has embarked on an ambitious training program involving the kinds of role-playing scenarios one usually finds in acting rehearsals on stage. Simply by observing these encounters, in the best tradition of documentarians like Frederick Wiseman, Allan King, and Nicolas Phillibert, Alexis Poukine has created drama of the highest order, finding the whole of human emotion in this refreshingly new kind of talking cure.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

7:00 p.m: The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 3: Kunst der farbe

2024. Argentina. Directed by Mariano Llinás. North American premiere. In Spanish, German; and English subtitles. 90 min.

From the great fabulist Mariano Llinas, the Argentine writer-director-producer-actor who brought us a pair of heroically ambitious mashups of popular movie and literary genres in Extraordinary Stories (2008) and La Flor (2018), comes this equally sly, inventive experiment in epistemological uncertainty. It is a trilogy of films about creativity, friendship, power, kitsch, mythmaking, portraiture, failure, delusion, egos, and alter-egos. Invited by Mondongo, an iconoclastic Argentine art collective named after a colonial-era tripe stew, to document their creation of a baptistry out of colorful plasticine (in The Tightrope Walker), Llinas grows restless, and the collaboration begins to go off the rails as he tries to beat the artists at their own game (in Portrait of Mondongo), taking Johannes Itten’s seminal study of color theory from 1961, the source of Mondongo’s work Baptisterio de los colores, as the inspiration for his own poetic and comedic flights of fancy (in Kunst der Farbe).

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

7:30 p.m: GEN_.

2025. France/Switzerland/Italy. Directed by Gianluca Matarrese. New York premiere. In Italian, English; English subtitles. 104 min.

At a Milanese public hospital for gender transition and infertility assistance, one of the few of its kind in Italy, Dr. Maurizio Bini presides over a team of medical professionals who provide humane, ethically responsible care in brave defiance of a conservative government and a profiteering pharmaceutical industry. Filmmaker Gianluca Matarrese makes all-too-human the abstractions of in-vitro fertilization and gender-affirming therapies as the women and men who pass through Dr. Bini’s clinic, seen at their most vulnerable and resilient, seek the fullness of life in their wish to have a child or realize their true identity.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2