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 Stimming Pool

2024. UK. Directed by The Neurocultures Collective, Steven Eastwood. Members of The Neurocultures Collective: Benjamin Brown, Georgia Bradburn, Sam Chown-Ahern, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker. New York premiere. 70 min.

What, really, is magic realism? What is “an autistic camera”? In their chimerical film—a mash up of various movie genres that takes on a logic of its own—the Neurocultures Collective (Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, and Lucy Walker), in collaboration with the artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood, have worked with a cast of autistic actors and non-actors and the cinematographer Greg Oke (Aftersun) to create a shimmering composite portrait of how they perceive and experience the world. “The curiosity of this [autistic] camera,” they explain, “discovers a relay of subjects who stray through the world, revealing environments often hostile to autistic experience—such as a hectic workplace and a crowded pub—and quiet spaces that offer respite from them. Sometimes the camera wanders off without any guide, finding an ancient woodland, an abandoned testing center, even a fragment from an animated zombie film set in the American Civil War….”

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

1:30 p.m: Görünür Görünmez: Bir (Oto)Sansür Antolojisi (Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship) & Jericho Walk

Görünür Görünmez: Bir (Oto)Sansür Antolojisi (Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship). 2024. Netherlands/Turkey. Directed by Seen Unseen Collective. Directed by Fırat Yücel, Erhan Örs, Hakan Bozyurt, Can Memiş, Sibil Çekmen, Serra Akcan, Nadir Sönmez, belit sağ. North American premiere . In Turkish, English, Kurdish; English subtitles. 66 min.

It’s a dangerous time to be a journalist, activist, historian, or artist in Turkey. In this politically courageous anthology film, an eight member collective formed by Altyazı Fasikül from Turkey recounts stories of journalistic and artistic repression in contemporary Turkey, questioning the limits of free expression and the risks of (self-)censorship, lawsuits, violence, and imprisonment. Using an arsenal of material—clandestine footage, encrypted communications, eyewitness testimonials, reenactments, and long-suppresed documentation—the filmmakers bear witness to the Gezi protests of 2013, the Armenian genocide, the violation of the rights of political prisoners, and the secret cruising spots of Istanbul where the gay scene is still mostly underground.

Jericho Walk. 2025. USA. Directed by Jim McKay, Jeff Reichert, Farihah Zaman. World premiere. In English, Spanish, Arabic, Kreyòl, Tamil, Nahuatl, and Kiswahili; no subtitles. 47 min.

Following a tradition of protest and silent prayer that goes back some 3,000 years, the religious and secular volunteers of the New Sanctuary Coalition make seven revolutions around the New York Immigration Court at 26 Federal Plaza, expressing their solidarity with migrants whose fates hang in the balance. Subjected to myriad indignities and the trauma of knowing they can be separated from their families or deported at any time, these are the victims of an increasingly cruel and unjust immigration system in the United States. Award-winning filmmakers Jim McKay, Jeff Reichert, and Farihah Zaman, working with the brilliant sound designer Ernst Karel, document a political action that took place in December 2019.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

4:00 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

4:30 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