Doc Fortnight 2025

MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media

 

Feb 20–Mar 7, 2025

 

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

 

Now in its 24th year, MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight festival presents adventurous new nonfiction and hybrid fiction cinema from around the world. Featuring 14 world premieres and 19 North American or US premieres from 28 countries, Doc Fortnight 2025 celebrates new work by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens, Lila Avilés, Radu Jude, Mariano Llinas, Errol Morris, Stanley Nelson, Ben Rivers, Amy Sillman, Cauleen Smith, Elisabeth Subrin, Lou Ye, Jasmila Žbanić, and many others.

 

A beacon for innovative storytelling, Doc Fortnight 2025 opens on February 20 with the world premiere of Stanley Nelson’s We Want the Funk!, a syncopated history of a worldwide cultural phenomenon featuring explosive performances by James Brown, Parliament Funkadelic, Fela Kuti, and more. Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Middletown, a documentary fresh from Sundance about a group of muckraking high school students who uncovered a toxic waste scandal in upstate New York in the early 1990s, is the festival’s centerpiece screening. Doc Fortnight 2025 closes with the world premiere of Errol Morris’s Chaos: The Manson Murders, which posits new theories, and discredits old ones, about the notoriously savage slayings.

 

This year’s featured documentaries range from stories of influential figures like Andy Warhol, John Lilly, B. F. Skinner, Henry Fonda, and Emerik Blum, to portraits of places as varied as zoos and wildlife refuges in Argentina , the city of Wuhan during the outbreak of COVID, and a Milanese hospital for gender transition and infertility assistance.

 

As Doc Fortnight 2025 so vividly illustrates, contemporary filmmakers are confronting some of the most complex issues of our time. Sam Abbas’s Europe’s New Faces, with music by Bertrand Bonello, puts a human face on the humanitarian crisis of African and Middle Eastern refugees and asylum seekers adrift both in the Mediterranean sea and in the legal limbo of the EU’s broken immigration system. Lesla Diak’s Dad’s Lullaby observes a soldier with PTSD returning from the Ukrainian front. Altyazi Fasikul, a filmmaking collective in Turkey, recounts stories of journalistic and artistic repression under the Erdogan regime in Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship. Daniela Meressa Rusnoková’s Grey Zone and Lynne Sachs’s Contractions are anguished portraits of women facing pregnancy complications and societal threats to their bodily autonomy, respectively. And Cauleen Smith’s Volcano Manifesto, presented as a trilogy for the first time, is but one of several contemporary works in Doc Fortnight that investigate themes of exile, liberation, the erasure of Indigenous societies and cultures, and the legacy of colonialism.

 

In addition to We Want the Funk!, Doc Fortnight 2025 celebrates music in other creatively diverse and thrilling ways, from Ephraim Asili’s Isis and Osiris, about the jazz legend Alice Coltrane’s experimentations with harp, to Lila Avilés’s Músicas, a new featurette by the director of Totem about an orchestral band of women musicians from 60 different indigenous Mexican communities. Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo, which will be bracketed by a live cello performance, imagines an “invisible space”: the house outside Madrid, now destroyed, where Francisco Goya created his “Black Paintings” between 1819 and 1824.

 

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, with Olivia Priedite, Film Program Coordinator; and Chandra Knotts, Filmmaker Liaison, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

 

 

#We Want the Funk! 2025. Directed by Stanley Nelson

Followed by a conversation with Stanley Nelson and Nicole London

Thu, Feb 20, 7:00 p.m.

 

#Šedá zóna (Grey Zone). 2024. Directed by Daniela Meressa Rusnoková

#Contractions. 2024. Directed by Lynne Sachs

Introduced by Lynne Sachs

Fri, Feb 21, 4:00 p.m., Thu, Feb 27, 6:30 p.m.

 

#Monólogo colectivo (Collective Monologue). 2024. Directed by Jessica Sarah Rinland

Followed by a conversation with Jessica Sarah Rinland

Fri, Feb 21, 7:00 p.m., Wed, Feb 26, 4:00 p.m.

 

#Opt ilustrate din Lumea Ideală (Eight Postcards from Utopia). 2024. Directed by Radu Jude, Christian Ferencz-Flatz 

#Sleep #2. 2024. Directed by Radu Jude

Sat, Feb 22, 1:00 p.m., Wed, Feb 26, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Blum: Gospodari svoje budućnosti (Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny). 2024. Directed by Jasmila Žbanić 

Followed by a conversation with Jasmila Žbanić

Sat, Feb 22, 4:30 p.m., Thu, Feb 27, 4:30 p.m.

 

#An Unfinished Film. 2024. Directed by Lou Ye

Sat, Feb 22, 6:30 p.m.

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 1: Abstraction as Apprehension

Introduced by the filmmakers

Sat, Feb 22, 7:00 p.m., Fri, Feb 28, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 2: The Music of Sound

Introduced by the filmmakers

Sun, Feb 23, 1:30 p.m., Wed, Feb 26, 2:00 p.m.

 

#Henry Fonda for President. 2024. Directed by Alexander Horwath

Followed by a conversation with Alexander Horwath

Sun, Feb 23, 4:00 p.m.

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 3: Manifest

Mon, Feb 24, 4:00 p.m., Fri, Feb 28, 7:30 p.m.

 

#Endless Cookie. 2025. Written and directed by Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

Mon, Feb 24, 6:30 p.m., Mon, Mar 3, 4:00 p.m.

 

#Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued. 2025. Directed by Julian Castronovo 

#历历如画 (14 Paintings). 2023. Directed by Dongnan Chen

Followed by a conversation with Julian Castronovo

Mon, Feb 24, 7:00 p.m., Thu, Feb 27, 4:00 p.m.

 

#Algo viejo, algo nuevo, algo prestado (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed). 2024. Directed by Hernán Rosselli

Tue, Feb 25, 6:30 p.m., Thu, Feb 27, 2:00 p.m.

 

#John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office. 2025. Directed by Michael Almereyda, Courtney Stephens

Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

Tue, Feb 25, 7:00 p.m., Tue, Mar 4, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari (Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries). 2024. Directed by Massimo d’Anolfi, Martina Parenti

Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

Wed, Feb 26, 6:30 p.m., Wed, Mar 5, 1:00 p.m.

 

#B.F. Skinner Plays Himself. 2025. Directed by Ted Kennedy

Followed by a conversation with Ted Kennedy

Wed, Feb 26, 7:30 p.m., Sun, Mar 2, 4:00 p.m.

 

#Middletown. 2025. Directed by Jesse Moss, Amanda McBaine

Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

Thu, Feb 27, 7:00 p.m.

 

#So Close, So Far. 2025. Directed by Zhu Yudi

#Field Recording. 2024. Written and directed by Quinne Larsen

Fri, Feb 28, 4:00 p.m., Tue, Mar 4, 6:30 p.m.

 

#Europe’s New Faces. 2025. Directed by Sam Abbas 

Followed by a conversation with Sam Abbas

Fri, Feb 28, 7:00 p.m., Sun, Mar 2, 4:30 p.m.

 

#The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 1: The Tightrope Walker. 2024. Directed by Mariano Llinás

Introduced by Mariano Llinás

Sat, Mar 1, 1:00 p.m.

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 4: Memory and Desire, Stirring

Introduced by the filmmakers

Sat, Mar 1, 1:30 p.m., Mon, Mar 3, 4:30 p.m.

 

#The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 2: Portrait of Mondongo. 2024. Directed by Mariano Llinás

Introduced by Mariano Llinás

Sat, Mar 1, 3:30 p.m.

 

#Who Cares. 2024. Directed by Alexe Poukine

Followed by a conversation with Alexe Poukine

Sat, Mar 1, 4:00 p.m., Wed, Mar 5, 4:00 p.m.

 

#The Triptych of Mondongo, Part 3: Kunst der farbe. 2024. Directed by Mariano Llinás

Followed by a conversation with Mariano Llinás

Sat, Mar 1, 7:00 p.m.

 

#GEN_. 2025. Directed by Gianluca Matarrese

Followed by a conversation with Dr. Bini and the filmmakers

Sat, Mar 1, 7:30 p.m., Thu, Mar 6, 4:00 p.m.

 

#The Stimming Pool. 2024. Directed by The Neurocultures Collective, Steven Eastwood

Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

Sun, Mar 2, 1:00 p.m., Tue, Mar 4, 4:00 p.m.

 

#Görünür Görünmez: Bir (Oto)Sansür Antolojisi (Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship). 2024. Directed by Seen Unseen Collective

#Jericho Walk. 2025. Directed by Jim McKay, Jeff Reichert, Farihah Zaman

Followed by a conversation with the filmmakers

Sun, Mar 2, 1:30 p.m., Wed, Mar 5, 5:00 p.m.

 

#Lullaby. 2024. Directed by Lesia Diak

Mon, Mar 3, 6:30 p.m., Thu, Mar 6, 4:30 p.m.

 

#La Quinta del Sordo. 2022. Directed by Philippe Parreno

Mon, Mar 3, 7:00 p.m.

 

#Night Has Come. 2024. Directed by Paolo Tizón

#E-Four Specialist. 2025. Directed by Kevin Jerome Everson

Folllowed by a conversation with Paolo Tizón

Tue, Mar 4, 7:00 p.m., Fri, Mar 7, 2:00 p.m.

 

#Bogancloch. 2024. Directed by Ben Rivers

Followed by a conversation with Ben Rivers

Wed, Mar 5, 7:30 p.m., Thu, Mar 6, 2:00 p.m.

 

#CHAOS: The Manson Murders. 2025. Directed by Errol Morris

Followed by a conversation with Errol Morris

Thu, Mar 6, 7:00 p.m.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5792