NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces the full festival lineup for Doc Fortnight 2025, the 24th edition of its annual showcase of adventurous new nonfiction cinema from around the world. Running from February 20 to March 7, 2025, Doc Fortnight 2025 will showcase more than 30 features and short film pairings, including 14 world premieres and 19 North American or US premieres from 28 countries. The festival will celebrate new work by Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens, Lila Aviles, Radu Jude, Mariano Llinás, Errol Morris, Stanley Nelson, Ben Rivers, Cauleen Smith, Elisabeth Subrin, Lou Ye, Jasmila Žbanić, and many others. Doc Fortnight 2025 is organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, with Olivia Priedite, Film Program Coordinator, and Chandra Knotts, Filmmaker Liaison, Department of Film.
A beacon for innovative storytelling and bold perspectives, Doc Fortnight 2025 will open with the world premiere of Stanley Nelson’s We Want the Funk!, a syncopated history of a worldwide cultural phenomenon. The festival will close 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. The festival will feature 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, as its centerpiece screening on February 27.
In addition to Middletown, the festival will present documentaries on other notable places and influential figures. These films range from portraits as varied as zoos and animal shelters in Argentina (Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue) to the city of Wuhan during the outbreak of COVID-19 (Lou Ye’s docufiction An Unfinished Film) and a Milanese hospital for gender transition and infertility assistance (Gianluca Matarrese’s GEN_). The festival will include stories of influential figures including Andy Warhol (Radu Jude’s Sleep #2), John Lilly (Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephen’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office), B. F. Skinner (Ted Kennedy’s B. F. Skinner Plays Himself), Henry Fonda (Alexander Horwath’s Henry Fonda for President), and Emerik Blum (Jasmila Žbanić’s Blum: Masters of Their Future).
This year’s festival will spotlight new work by contemporary filmmakers who 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 in both the Mediterranean Sea and 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 Erdoğan 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 2025 that investigate themes of exile, liberation, the erasure of Indigenous societies and cultures, and the legacy of colonialism.
Doc Fortnight 2025 will celebrate music not only with Stanley Nelson’s We Want the Funk!, but also with Ephrahim Asili’s Isis and Osiris, about the jazz legend Alice Coltrane’s experimentations with harp, and Lila Aviles’ Músicas, a new featurette by the director of Totem about an orchestral band of women musicians from 60 different Indigenous Mexican communities. In addition, the festival will include Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo, a special screening bracketed by a live cello performance, that imagines an “invisible space”: the house outside Madrid, now destroyed, where Francisco Goya created his “Black Paintings” between 1819 and 1824.
