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: Endless Cookie

2025. Canada. Written and directed by Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver. New York premiere. 97 min.

A marvelously inventive throwback to underground comix of Kim Deitch and the antic handdrawn animation of Sally Cruikshank and Suzan Pitt, Endless Cookie takes us on a wild ride with the half-brothers Scriver—Peter is the Indigenous kid, Seth the white one—as they journey back to 1980s Toronto and the icily remote regions of Shamattawa, a First Nations community in northern Manitoba, in search of family ties and divides. The hilarious tales, many of them involving chaotic menageries of caribou, dogs, and kids, come fast and furious. But don’t be fooled by the Scrivers’ candy-coated, polymorphous cartooning and “aw shucks” narration, original though they may be, for Endless Cookie is a pretty damning indictment of the way Canada treats its Indigenous peoples.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

4:30 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

6:30 p.m: Dad’s Lullaby

2024. Ukraine/Romania/Croatia. Directed by Lesia Diak. US premiere. In Ukrainian; English subtitles. 78 min.

In her debut feature documentary, Lesia Diak observes 45-year-old Serihy Zinchuk, a Ukrainian soldier who returns from three harrowing years on the Eastern front to a fragile peace with his wife and young sons. In between moments of intimacy, tension, and loneliness, the filmmaker suddenly has the soldier turn the camera on her, and as she opens up about her own childhood experiences and her recent relationship with a war veteran, the emotional complexities of Dad’s Lullaby deepen further. “Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I have such deep empathy for male characters in my film—and for men in general,” Diak recalls, “because I witnessed it so closely, and it really broke my heart. When I witnessed similar experiences in the Zinchuk family, for instance why they are not more understanding of each other after this long separation, how they need to learn from scratch how to live their lives together again, it reminded me of many cases of separation, not least the case of my own family.”

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

7:00 p.m: La Quinta del Sordo

2022. Spain/Switzerland. Directed by Philippe Parreno. US premiere. 39 min.

A special screening bracketed by a live cello performance, Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo imagines an “invisible space”: the house outside Madrid, now destroyed, where Francisco Goya created his “Black Paintings” between 1819 and 1824. Using cutting-edge technologies in collaboration with the cinematographer Darius Khondji, editor Ael Dallier Vega, sound designer Nicolas Becker, and pioneering DJ and music producer Lexx, Parreno observes the Black Paintings (now at the Prado museum) in hypnotic, luminous detail, and evokes the aural and spatial environment in which Goya created them as a man in his seventies, when he was ill, deaf, and living in seclusion from the royal court. It was, as Parreno conveys in this work of uncanny science fiction, an “apocalyptic time,” one that had recently witnessed the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the massive eruption of an Indonesian volcano that triggered a change in the global climate.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2