MoMA's DOC FORTNIGHT 2024 Showcases Exciting Lineup of Documentaries

The Museum of Modern Art announces the lineup for Doc Fortnight 2024, the 23rd edition of its annual showcase of adventurous new nonfiction cinema from around the world. Running from February 22 through March 7, 2024, Doc Fortnight 2024 will present 13 features and six short films, with three additional special programs, screening in the Museum’s Titus Theaters.

The festival will open with  Scott Cummings’s Realm of Satan, an experimental portrait of the lives, environments, and  rituals of followers of the Church of Satan, and Will Close with Black Box Diaries, Japanese  journalist Shiori Ito’s courageous investigation into her own sexual assault. The festival will  also feature a centrepiece screening of Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, a thoroughly  researched archival documentary charting how jazz music, Cold War geopolitics, and  African decolonization movements converged in the 1961 assassination of Patrice  Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congolese state. All three films will  screen at MoMA following recent Sundance premieres. Doc Fortnight 2024 will also feature three special programs: a selection of artists’ films from across the Caribbean, curated by  the Puerto Rico–based Sociedad del Tiempo Libre; a dialogue between artist Tiffany Sia and  scholar Pavle Levi, sparked by their shared interest in landscape film and the Cold War’s  minor histories; and a spotlight on Gelare Khoshgozaran, who will present their first  monographic screening in New York as part of MoMA’s Modern Mondays artist cinema  series. 

Doc Fortnight 2024 is organized by Sophie Cavoulacos, Associate Curator, Department of  Film, MoMA, and Julian Ross, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, with Chandra  Knotts, Filmmaker Liaison, Department of Film, MoMA. 

"This year’s Doc Fortnight selection is a testament to the continued vitality of the  documentary art form,” said Cavoulacos. “In a moment of continued geopolitical crises,  these filmmakers delve into the political histories that animate our present realities, and  shine a light on individuals confronting systems of power—all the while pushing the field in  aesthetically daring new directions.”  

“Debut features from around the world and new work by leading moving-image artists  working in hybrid forms are at the core of the program, and attest to the documentary spirit  that motivates filmmakers to take a critical stance not only on what they show, but also  how,” said Ross.

The Doc Fortnight 2024 slate includes films from over 19 countries—many of which were  drawn from the best of festival programs over the last year, will be screening for the first  time in North America, or will be presented at MoMA fresh off world premieres. Across this  edition of the festival, filmmakers confront histories of violence and imperialism by  exposing their present-day reverberations and reanimating historical archives. Others  grapple with the uneasy role that technology plays in shaping the public sphere and the built  environment, or craft portraits of people, places, and subcultures.