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.
Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black, with major funding from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
