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: 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

4:30 p.m: John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office

2025. USA. Directed by Michael Almereyda, Courtney Stephens. Narrated by Chloë Sevigny. North American premiere. 90 min.

The French director Georges Franju, creator of fascinating, surreal hybrids of science and fiction like Blood of the Beasts, once remarked, “I have always been attracted by emanations of strangeness.” Michael Almereyda (Tesla, Experimenter, Hamlet) and Courtney Stephens (Invention, Terra Femme, Mixed Signals) prove worthy heirs to this seductively elusive form of cinema as they delve into the weird and mysterious world of John Lilly through historical footage, home movies, pop culture, and interviews with his contemporaries in science and art. An iconoclastic scientist whose experiments with dolphins and hallucinogens (LSD and ketamine) opened new pathways to consciousness as well as an understanding of the rights of cetaceans as sentient beings, Lilly also had a penchant for showmanship and fantasy that would lead, later in life, to episodes of self-destruction and folly. In his search for novel forms of communication and otherworldly experience, Lilly invented the isolation tank and, partnering with the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, famously presided over experiments involving a female researcher with a young male dolphin in a partially flooded house—investigations that inspired two very different Hollywood movies​, The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States​, as well as more serious inquiries into neurobiology and linguistics. ​Through Almereyda and Stephens’s own meeting of the minds​—and against the “shifting backdrops of 1950s Cold War military science, the drug-infused counterculture of the ’60s, and the environmental vanguard of the ’70s”—we come to recognize ​in John Lilly’s life and legacy​ a collective dreamscape of the 20th century.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

6:30 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 1

7:00 p.m: Night Has Come and E-Four Specialist

Night Has Come. 2024. Peru. Directed by Paolo Tizón. US premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 95 min.

The process of converting pimply faced teenagers into killers, so disturbingly depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and Frederick Wiseman’s Basic Training, is also the theme of Paolo Tizón’s portrait of an elite military unit in Peru, a powerful mediation on innocence and experience, and fragility and brutality. Callow young men, escaping girlfriend problems and estranged parents back home, are subjected to grueling physical and mental tests to determine their preparedness for surveillance, counterinsurgency, and combat missions in the VRAEM, Peru’s “cocaine valley,” a hotbed of drug trafficking and violence. Shot in a sulfurous chiaroscuro, a fog of war, that seems to enshroud the men in moral uncertainty, Night Has Come has perhaps quite fittingly earned the admiration of the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa.

E-Four Specialist. 2025. USA. Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson. 16mm. World premiere. 3 min.

Pleas Everson, Jr., a cousin of the award-winning filmmaker and artist Kevin Jerome Everson, recounts his experiences as an armored tank operator during Operation Desert Storm.

Location: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2