Giving Voice to the Unheard and the Isolated at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight ’25 – BRAZILIAN PRESS // O maior jornal brasileiro fora do Brasil
By Roger Costa
COLLECTIVE MONOLOGUE
This sensitive and sensorial documentary creates an intimate atmosphere among humans and animals, grabbing the audience’s heart since its beginning. Using various cinematic expressions (such as 16mm and surveillance cameras) to explore how these species communicate and co-exist, director Jessica Sarah Rinland captures wonderfully rare and affecting moments between the caretakers and the animals of a few zoos in Argentina, where she gets access to their activities and working process. An ode to the beauty of the human/animal relationship and the importance of preservation. (Screens February 21 and 26).
SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOMETHING BORROWED
Richly composed as a tense, yet poetic thriller about a family running a clandestine lottery system, director Hernán Rosselli draws from family experiences to create a gripping portrait of social and economic resistance. Blending fiction and doc, it examines the lives of the Felpetos family and their influential force in the community. The poetic aesthetic comes from the narration of the daughter, telling her experiences with the deceased father and how it affected the family business. As danger feels imminent among them, director Rosselli creates an impressive work of suspense influenced by the lights and shades of noir, neorealism and romanticism. (Screens February 25 and 27).
DAD’S LULLABY
Making her directorial debut with this incredibly touching, accurate and deeply humane doc, Ukranian director Lesia Diak announces herself as a major voice in the game. She digs deep in the emotional conflicts of a father who just returned home after spending 3 years in the war zone, the impact caused on his three sons and the lonely effects over his very pregnant and exhausted wife. Then, Diak turns the camera to herself during intimate conversations with her subject, where she reveals her own experiences with war, both involving her father and her former lover. As the relationships intensify, testing each family member’s limits, Diak casts an empathic eye on how displaced and disconnected Serihy, the 45-year-old father seems to be. The result is an accomplished humanitarian look at the emotional consequences of war. (Screens March 3 and 6).
GREY ZONE
Lyrical in its form, challenging in its social urgency, Slovakian filmmaker and photographer Daniela Meressa Rusnoková’s interconnected, dreamlike experimental doc, follows the experiences of trauma, fear and despair faced by premature births. Exposing her own experiences as well as other mothers, she offers an intriguing, heart-moving, pro-life insight on the subject, revealing the pain, but also the Hope filling the hearts of brave mothers counting on the miracle of existence. (Screens February 21 and 27).
EIGHT POSTCARDS FROM UTOPIA
Recently praised by Scorsese for his provocative cinematic skills, renowned filmmaker Radu Jude continues to explore the history of his home-country Romania with another example of his witty sarcasm and sharp political criticism. This time around, he conceives an hallucinating experiment told through the collage of bizarre TV commercials, observing the decline and fall of the civilization and the effects of the post-communist era aiming for a capitalist future. Co-directed by the philosopher Christian Ferencz-Flatz. (Screens February 22 and 26). (The 24th edition of Doc Fortnight, MoMA’s Festival of International Non-Fiction Film and Media runs February 20-March 7, 2025. Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, with Olivia Priedite, Film Program Coordinator; and Chandra Knotts, Filmmaker Liaison, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. Go to https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5792 for details).
