A Look at the Landscape of Our Time from a Hundred Feet Underground

After an online hiatus, MoMA’s festival of nonfiction film returns to theaters. Running February 23 to March 10, Doc Fortnight 2022 presents 29 new documentaries and genre-defying hybrid films from around the world. The festival, now in its 21st edition, emphasizes the new, with many films available to audiences in the United States for the first time. On the big screen (and on our Virtual Cinema streaming platform for members), you’ll encounter urgent conversations, discover rising talents, and catch films at MoMA before they hit local theaters (or your streaming queue).

As we put the finishing touches on this year’s festival, I am struck by an astonishing commonality across certain films. While speaking powerfully to the extraordinary times we are living in, these films originated long ago. The question of timeliness is a tricky one—you sure can’t plan prescience. What makes a film meet its moment, anyway? This intangible resonance is why we look to art, and to the resolve and insight of artists, for perspectives on the world.

I start to see time-lapse across the slate, from James Benning’s reprise of an early film to Claire Doyon’s retrospect of 18 years of recordings of her autistic daughter. Other ellipses are more melancholic, like Crystal Z Campbell’s reflections on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre or Hala Alabdalla’s portrait of her friend Omar Amiralay, the great director of political films, who, by a matter of weeks, didn’t live to see the 2011 revolution in his native Syria.

If I had to summarize the mood of the festival this year, it would be: how do human actions and ideas about how we should live together leave their mark on the natural environment and shape the built environment? That sounds like something you’ve been thinking about for a long time.

For the last decade I’ve been looking at the ways subterranean spaces allow for a kind of flexibility of form and how literally being underground allows for an unpredictability and interconnectedness that does not get mapped on the surface. As an interdisciplinary artist who gathers from a wide range of sources for my work, I find “underground” a useful way of thinking about how the things I’m interested in interrelate. With Bunker, the political discourse around “siloed” speech is presented physically to viewers. There is the speech, there are the men, and there is where they have chosen to live. In their effort to find freedom, they have put themselves into very isolated conditions. The landscape of the United States is riddled with these bunkers, silos, and tunnels that are both real and of the mind. I had become pretty tired of the coastal discussions of what the Midwest was like and who was living there. For that reason, I wanted to go to the Midwest to see people and hear their stories and experience their worlds.