Doc Fortnight 2026

MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media

 

Feb 26–Mar 12, 2026

MoMA

 

Marc by Sofia. 2025. USA. Directed by Sofia Coppola

 

MoMA’s annual festival of documentary cinema marks its 25th year with a celebration of important new discoveries in nonfiction film. Ranging from immersive cinéma vérité and innovative essay films to hybrid works that boldly fuse documentary and fiction, the festival brings adventurous voices and thought-provoking perspectives from around the world to New York audiences.

 

Doc Fortnight 2026 includes 14 feature films and 19 short and medium-length films by both emerging and established directors working across the nonfiction field. Throughout this edition of the festival, filmmakers confront political histories—from the Serbo-Croatian War to recent political protests in Thailand and the lasting reverberations of state violence in Iran—through personal histories, unseen archives, speculative restagings, and reflections on the nature of commemoration. The program further highlights portraits of kin and community bonds through contexts as diverse as family loss, psychoanalysis, and contemporary powwow culture, alongside vivid portraits of place that span Internet-famous vistas alongside the Hong Kong waterfront, a journey through the history and folklore of Portugal’s Alentejo region, and a town in East Sussex whose reenactments of the Arthurian myth of the Holy Grail speak to today’s ecological crises.

 

The program also features three genre-defying shorts programs and a spotlight on celebrated Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, whose avant-garde small-gauge films will be presented in their first New York monographic screening as part of MoMA’s Modern Mondays artist cinema series.

 

Organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of Film, MoMA, and guest curator Jesse Cumming, with Chandra Knotts, Filmmaker Liaison, and Olivia Priedite, Film Program Coordinator, Department of Film, MoMA.

 

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 The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund through The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

 

 

Doc Fortnight 2026 Schedule

 

#Nova ’78. 2025. UK/Portugal. 

Directed by Aaron Brookner, Rodrigo Areias. North American premiere. 78 min.

Followed by a conversation with Aaron Brookner

Thu, Feb 26, 7:00 p.m./ Sun, Mar 1, 1:30 p.m.

 

In 1978, Beat poet William S. Burroughs made his return to the United States after two decades in Latin America, North Africa, and Europe. This occasioned the now-legendary Nova Convention, a multimedia celebration of Burroughs that gathered Laurie Anderson, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Philip Glass, and countless other luminaires on the stage of the Entermedia Theater in New York City’s East Village. Nova ’78, based on newly rediscovered footage filmed by Downtown documentarian Howard Brookner, is an exhilarating journey into the heart of 1970s counterculture. Brookner (with young Tom DiCillo and Jim Jarmusch on additional photography and sound) captured performances, from Frank Zappa reading from Naked Lunch to a panel discussion including Timothy Leary, as well as equally evocative off-stage moments. Co-directors Rodrigo Areias and Aaron Brookner (who stewards his uncle’s archive through the Howard Brookner Legacy Project) have elegantly shaped vast amounts of footage into an immersive capsule of the period. Between No Wave acts, signs of the times are palpable, from the Iranian Revolution, to the dread of nuclear annihilation, to the anti-queer Proposition 6 ballot measure. Animated by Burroughs’s prescient interests in media, communication, and control, Nova ’78 highlights a generation of artists facing down an uncertain future with boundless creative freedom.

 

 

#Amílcar. 2025. Spain/Portugal/France/Sweden/Cape Verde. 

Directed by Miguel Eek. North American premiere. DCP. In Portuguese, French, Creole, Spanish; English subtitles. 87 min.

Followed by a conversation with Miguel Eek

Fri, Feb 27, 7:00 p.m./ Mon, Mar 2, 4:30 p.m.

 

A deft and daring feat of montage, Amílcar combines newsreels, Portuguese colonial archives, revolutionary cinema, and original 16mm compositions to evoke a free-form portrait of the Cape Verdean/Guinean revolutionary figure Amílcar Cabral. The Spanish documentarian Miguel Eek uses Cabral’s political writings, poems, and private letters—as well as documents detailing his increased surveillance by the Portuguese state—to trace Cabral’s path from agronomy student in Lisbon to freedom fighter and charismatic leader in the liberation movement against Portuguese rule. Far from a comprehensive biography, Amílcar attempts to render a complex interior portrait of Cabral under the momentous weight of his time. The man, the visionary thinker, the tactician, the diplomat—each emerges behind Cabral’s political project of African emancipation and self-determination, which precipitated the independence of Guinea-Bissau and the collapse of the Salazar regime in Portugal, mere months after Cabral’s assassination in 1973.

 

 

#甘露水/ 감로수 (Daughter of Nectar). 2025. Taiwan. 

Directed by Pang-Chuan Huang, Chunni Lin. North American premiere. DCP. In Taiwanese, Japanese; English subtitles. 142 min.

Sat, Feb 28, 1:30 p.m./ Tue, Mar 3, 6:30 p.m.

 

The titular Daughter of Nectar of Pang-Chuan Huang and Chunni Lin’s quietly magisterial feature debut is a 1921 sculpture by Taiwanese sculptor Huang Tu-Shui, whose early-20th-century studies led him to Japan, but whose relations with his home nation’s former colonizer made him a postwar pariah and forced his work into near-obscurity. As it revisits Huang’s refined practice—and questions of nationalism and arts education in the era more broadly—the film elegantly folds in the present day, including footage of contemporary students working on projects at Huang Tu-Shui’s alma mater, and the 2021 unveiling of the Daughter after 47 years in storage. Shot on tactile 16mm, deeply rhythmic in construction, and accented by subtle in-camera effects, Daughter of Nectar is intimate and grand.

 

 

#Narrative. 2025. Thailand/Japan/South Korea. 

Directed by Anocha Suwichakornpong. North American premiere. DCP. In Thai; English subtitles. 49 min.

โลคอลเซนเซชันส์ (Local Sensations). 2025. Thailand. 

Directed by Tulapop Saenjaroen. North American premiere. DCP. In Thai; English subtitles. 25 min.

 

Followed by a conversation with Anocha Suwichakornpong and Tulapop Saenjaroen

Sat, Feb 28, 4:30 p.m./ Thu, Mar 5, 4:30 p.m.

 

Anocha Suwichakornpong’s latest shape-shifting excavation of Thai political history examines still-palpable events: the bloody military crackdown that left 90 dead and 2,000 injured during the 2010 pro-democracy protests in Bangkok. On the 15th anniversary of the massacre, the filmmaker invited families of the victims to take part in rehearsal workshops for her forthcoming fiction film about the trial of the perpetrators. For relatives who have yet to see justice in their own lives, the mediated sessions were a space to exchange lived experience, collectively process trauma, and seek legal guidance. Foregrounding its own theatricality and alternating between testimony and staged exchanges, Narrative creates a hybrid cinematic space from which to reflect on the writing of history and imagine pathways to justice.

 

Questions of commemoration also resonate in Local Sensations, a new work by Tulapop Saenjaroen. Opening with words from “How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine,” by architecture scholar Chatri Prakitnonthakan, the film unfolds as an oblique exploration of monuments and sanctification in Thai society. Through textured black-and-white 16mm cinematography, Saenjaroen encounters nary a statue, instead observing the interplay between beings in space in footage of a glassblowing workshop, an improvised musical happening, a game among architecture students, and a nature center’s animal inhabitants. From this network of gestures, the film invites a “reconsideration of what ‘locality’ and ‘monumentality’ might mean.”

 

 

#Powwow People. 2025. USA. 

Directed by Sky Hopinka. With Ruben Little Head, Gina Bluebird, Freddie Cozad, Jamie John, Shaandiin Tome, Jacque Clark. New York premiere. DCP. 88 min.

Followed by a conversation with Sky Hopinka

Sat, Feb 28, 7:00 p.m./ Tue, Mar 3, 4:00 p.m.

 

The long-awaited second feature by artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) grounds vérité-style documentary in the rhythm and relationships of contemporary Native life. Working with a group of collaborators, Hopinka invited singers, drummers, and dancers from across the powwow circuit, along with vendors and community members, to participate in a gathering at Seattle’s Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. The participatory ethos is immersive and kinetic, as Hopinka and cinematographer Shaandiin Tome’s cameras move through this intimate space. Shot over three days but edited to unfold from morning to nightfall—from event preparations, to the Tiny Tots dance, to the men’s competition, which culminates in a continuous 30-minute shot of a Northern Traditional dance special—the powwow resonates as a celebration of tradition across generations and a living form animated by those, Hopinka included, bringing it into the future.

 

 

#Cara a Cara (Face to Face). 2025. Uruguay/Argentina. 

Directed by Federico Veiroj. North American premiere. DCP. In Spanish; English subtitles. 69 min.

Followed by a conversation with Federico Veiroj

Sun, Mar 1, 2:00 p.m./ Tue, Mar 3, 7:00 p.m.

 

Crafty and deceptively rich, Cara a Cara is the first documentary from acclaimed Uruguayan auteur Federico Veiroj. A portrait of the director’s father by way of their shared relationship to psychoanalysis, the film employs a mix of archival home videos, staged sequences, contemporary exchanges, excerpts from Veiroj’s own narrative features, and playful musical cues. Wedding the formal lightness of a sketch with the weight of a profound familial excavation, Veiroj delivers more than the film’s limited means might suggest, including clever gestures that blur the line between documentary and fiction. Offbeat, humorous, and tender, Cara a Cara is one of the year’s unexpected nonfiction delights.

 

 

#Mirotvorac (Peacemaker). 2025. Croatia. 

Directed by Ivan Ramljak. North American premiere. DCP courtesy Taskovski. In Croatian; English subtitles.. 100 min.

Followed by a conversation with Ivan Ramljak

Sun, Mar 1, 4:30 p.m./ Thu, Mar 5, 6:30 p.m.

 

Winner of the Grand Prize at the 2025 Doc Leipzig festival, Mirotvorac traces the months preceding the 1991 Serbo-Croatian War—itself an outcome of the long collapse of Yugoslavia—through the figure of Josip Reihl Kir, an eastern Croatian politician who strove to diffuse tensions in his community right up until his violent assassination. Composed almost entirely of Croatian television archival material—much of it previously unseen—the images are accompanied by offscreen, first-person accounts that offer an expanded oral history of Kir and that fraught moment. Mirotvorac marks a career high for Ivan Ramljak, one of Croatia’s most respected documentary filmmakers, who deftly expands a contained moment in history into a gripping, resonant reflection on the elusive nature of peace.

 

 

#Matter of Britain. 2026. UK.

Directed by Peter Treherne. World premiere. DCP. 103 min.

Followed by a conversation with Peter Treherne

Mon, Mar 2, 7:00 p.m./ Wed, Mar 4, 4:30 p.m.

 

Shot over one year, in collaboration with over 300 members from the parish of Mayfield, East Sussex, Matter of Britain, the sly and surprising debut feature of English artist and filmmaker Peter Treherne, recasts the Arthurian myth of the Holy Grail. Shot on sumptuous 16mm, with an eye attuned to both the quiet beauty of the English countryside and naturally lit interiors, Matter of Britain interweaves documentary and performance. Treherne revels in the anachronistic while cleverly foregrounding the atemporal; we repeatedly encounter modern-day speech and technology amid medieval garb and recitations. The film’s core pivots on a resonant echo between the initial myth’s concern with a ravaged wasteland and our contemporary agricultural crises.

 

 

#As Estações (The Seasons). 2025. Portugal/France/Spain/Austria. 

Directed by Maureen Fazendeiro. US premiere. DCP courtesy Square Eyes. In Portuguese, German; English subtitles. 82 min.

Followed by a conversation with Maureen Fazendeiro

Wed, Mar 4, 7:00 p.m./ Sun, Mar 8, 2:30 p.m.

 

In her feature directorial debut, Maureen Fazendeiro, who delighted with her recent medium-length film The Inhabitants (New Directors/New Films 2025), undertakes a journey through time and space across Portugal’s Alentejo region. Initially drawn to the account of German archeologists who first studied the area’s neolithic dolmens as World War II broke out across Europe, Fazendeiro crafts a tableau as rich as the variegated landscapes captured by the film’s lush 16mm cinematography. Weaving the archaeologists’ field notes with fictional passages inspired by regional legends, encounters with local elders singing Communist folk songs, and goats aplenty, Fazendeiro memorializes stories past and present in a place steeped in history, but rapidly changing due to rural depopulation.

 

 

#大湾区之肋 (The Rib of the Greater Bay Area). 2026. China/Hong Kong. 

Directed by Zhou Tao. Commissioned by M+, Hong Kong. North American premiere. DCP. 70 min.

Thu, Mar 5, 7:00 p.m./ Fri, Mar 6, 4:30 p.m.

 

Over nearly two decades, China’s Zhou Tao has earned a venerated position as one of the most unique and surprising moving-image artists of his generation. One constant across Zhou’s practice is his ability to deploy basic filmic devices like composition, depth, and camera movement to play with perspective in ways that are not only visually dazzling but subtly political. Here, the artist recasts photogenic coastal locations from the Guangdong/Hong Kong/Macau Greater Bay Area famed for their social media virality by privileging the candid, the hazy, and the abstract over crisp poses engineered for likes. Constantly shapeshifting, with its scroll-like camera movements accented by a mix of on-site and sourced sound, The Rib of the Greater Bay Area is another transfixing entry in Zhou’s rich body of work.

 

 

#Noghteh-e-Goriz (The Vanishing Point). 2025. Iran/USA/France. 

Directed by Bani Khoshnoudi. US premiere. DCP. In Farsi, English; English subtitles. 103 min.

Followed by a conversation with Bani Khoshnoudi

Fri, Mar 6, 7:00 p.m./ Sat, Mar 7, 2:30 p.m.

 

A documentary essay of astonishing breadth and urgency—and the winner of the Visions du Réel Burning Lights Competition Jury Prize—The Vanishing Point explores memory, loss, and resistance reverberating across personal and collective histories. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, filmmaker and artist Bani Khoshnoudi revisits imagery from family archives and years of diaristic filming in her home country. Breaking a decades-long silence, Khoshnoudi reconstructs the story of her disappeared cousin, who was executed at age 27 during the 1988 purges in Iran’s political prisons. Confronting the generational weight of silence on a population living under state violence, the film is equally rooted in the present day, swelling with the force of Iran’s ongoing popular protest movements.

 

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 1: Intersecting Memories

Followed by a conversation with Monica Moraru and Sophie Sabet

Sat, Mar 7, 2:00 p.m./ Tue, Mar 10, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 2: Sight Lines

Followed by a conversation with Mike Stoltz

Sat, Mar 7, 4:30 p.m./ Mon, Mar 9, 4:30 p.m.

 

#Tycoon. 2026. Directed by Charlotte Zhang

Followed by a conversation with Charlotte Zhang

Sat, Mar 7, 7:00 p.m./ Tue, Mar 10, 6:30 p.m.

 

#Doc Fortnight Shorts 3: Back to Earth

Followed by a conversation with Xiao Zhang

Sun, Mar 8, 2:00 p.m./ Wed, Mar 11, 4:00 p.m.

 

#EIGHT BRIDGES. 2026. Directed by James Benning

Followed by a conversation with James Benning

Sun, Mar 8, 4:30 p.m./ Wed, Mar 11, 4:30 p.m.

 

#An Evening with Mark Jenkin

Mon, Mar 9, 7:00 p.m.

 

#Remake. 2025. Directed by Ross McElwee

Followed by a conversation with Ross McElwee

Tue, Mar 10, 7:00 p.m./ Thu, Mar 12, 4:00 p.m.

 

 

#Marc by Sofia. 2025. USA. Directed by Sofia Coppola. New York premiere. DCP courtesy A24. 97 min.

Followed by a conversation with Sofia Coppola and Marc Jacobs

Wed, Mar 11, 7:00 p.m. 

 

Sofia Coppola’s documentary film debut is an intimate portrait of American designer Marc Jacobs, her close friend of 30 years. Largely eschewing biographical framing and talking heads, Coppola instead crafts a vivid account of Jacobs’s culture-defining creative world. Loosely anchored by the production of his 2024 spring collection, which the film follows from inception to runway show, Marc by Sofia interweaves archival footage, candid interviews, and creative influences from across Jacobs’s body of work. Part time capsule, part mood board, the film evokes the designer’s inimitable student days at Parsons, his legendary grunge collection for Perry Ellis, his storied eponymous brand and boundary-pushing at Louis Vuitton, all the way to his present outlook—all with the genial ease befitting an iconic friendship.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5881