The Museum of Modern Art’s annual Doc Fortnight returns for its 24th edition, running from February 20th to March 6th, 2025. This year’s festival presents cutting-edge nonfiction and hybrid fiction films from 28 countries, with 14 world premieres and 19 North American or U.S. debuts.
Opening the festival is Stanley Nelson’s We Want the Funk!—a rhythmic deep dive into the global impact of funk music, featuring legendary performances by James Brown, Parliament Funkadelic, and Fela Kuti. The centerpiece screening, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Middletown, follows a group of high school journalists who uncovered a toxic waste scandal in 1990s upstate New York. Closing the festival is Errol Morris’s CHAOS: The Manson Murders, which reexamines one of America’s most infamous crimes. Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Among the standout works, Sam Abbas’s Europe’s New Faces explores the struggles of African and Middle Eastern refugees navigating the Mediterranean and European immigration policies. Lesla Diak’s Dad’s Lullaby offers a poignant look at a soldier coping with PTSD after returning from the Ukrainian front.
The festival also spotlights music documentaries, including Ephraim Asili’s Isis and Osiris, which explores Alice Coltrane’s avant-garde jazz experiments, and Lila Avilés’s Músicas, a tribute to Indigenous Mexican women musicians. Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo brings Francisco Goya’s mysterious Black Paintings to life with a live cello performance.
Curated by Joshua Siegel, with support from Olivia Priedite and Chandra Knotts, Doc Fortnight 2025 promises a dynamic look at the most urgent and experimental voices in contemporary filmmaking. Don’t miss this bold and thought-provoking lineup at MoMA.
Image courtesy of MoMA
