Doc Fortnight 2025: Breaking Reality, One Frame at a Time

At MoMA, Memory and Desire Collide in a Cinematic Exploration of the Real and the Imagined.

 

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday. 2025. USA. Directed by Isaiah Davis. Courtesy the filmmaker

 

text by Eva Megannety

Doc Fortnight isn’t just an exhibition—it’s a provocation. MoMA’s annual nonfiction showcase has long been a space where documentary defies its own rules, and 2025 is no exception. This year’s lineup fractures, distorts, and reimagines the boundaries of nonfiction, blending memory, identity, desire, and upheaval into something more elusive—more intimate—more true. From legendary filmmakers like Errol Morris and Stanley Nelson to bold newcomers rewriting the language of documentary, these films dissolve fact and fiction, turning the camera into an accomplice, an intruder, an unreliable narrator. Among the exhibition’s most daring offerings is Doc Fortnight Shorts 4: Memory and Desire, a selection of films that probe the slipperiness of recollection and longing, proving once again that at Doc Fortnight, truth is never simple.

Prelude (2025, USA, dir. Jen DeNike)

Memory is a fragile thing, a collage of images and emotions that flicker and fade—except when celluloid steps in to hold it still. Prelude is a quiet, aching elegy where letters, family photographs, and the misty Scottish countryside form a bridge between past and present. DeNike crafts a dreamscape of longing as a daughter tries to reconcile her mother’s slipping mind with the secret history of a love that once burned bright. It’s an act of cinematic grace, a requiem for the things that time refuses to keep.

Blue (2024, Romania/Portugal/Hungary/Belgium, dir. Ana Vîjdea)

Some families suffocate with love. Some let it spill out in bursts of anxiety and control. In Blue, Ana Vîjdea delivers an unflinching portrait of Rodica, a Romanian mother scraping by in Belgium, desperate to keep her children close. Shot in tightly framed interiors that feel like walls closing in, the film pulses with the kind of intimacy that verges on claustrophobia. Love here is not soft; it’s a grip that doesn’t loosen, an embrace that lingers just a little too long. Vîjdea, ever the documentarian of human fragility, finds the tension between devotion and possession, between wanting to hold on and knowing you must let go.

Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday (2025, USA, dir. Isaiah Davis)

Isaiah Davis has never been one to shy away from the body—its textures, its violence, its aesthetic possibilities. His latest work, Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday, is less a film than a living, breathing installation, a visceral meditation on Black masculinity that pulls from sculpture, music, and the language of fetish. Leather, metal, horrorcore, and the yearning croon of Boyz II Men collide in this dissection of identity, power, and nostalgia. It’s raw, provocative, and formally daring—a theatrical reworking of Davis’ own past installations that reminds us how history, both personal and cultural, is always being remade.

Freak (2024, USA, dir. Claire Barnett)

Some films look like they shouldn’t exist—like you’ve stumbled onto something you were never meant to see. Freak feels that illicit. Shot in jittery, voyeuristic camcorder footage that trembles with tension, Barnett’s film pulls us into the obsessive push-and-pull of young love, where devotion looks an awful lot like self-destruction. It’s raw, nervy, and unsettling, stripping intimacy down to something almost holy—if holiness could be found in jealousy, insecurity, and a love so intense it borders on madness.

School of the Dead (2025, USA, dir. Hannah Gross)

“We need a dead(wo)man to begin.” Helene Cixous’ words haunt School of the Dead, Hannah Gross’ spectral, elliptical debut. A film about absence, inheritance, and the ghosts that shape us, it plays like a séance conducted through cinema—casting Sierra Pettengill as both subject and specter, searching for something in the vast, ancient landscapes of Alberta. History, personal and prehistoric, folds in on itself: the voices of lost mothers, forgotten texts, and the echoes of Clarice Lispector all bleed into this hypnotic, shape-shifting hybrid. Gross makes grief tangible, a thing you can almost reach out and touch before it vanishes into the frame.

If Doc Fortnight 2025 proves anything, it’s that nonfiction cinema is no longer bound by objectivity—or even reality. The festival’s most striking moments weren’t just about documenting the world as it is, but about reshaping it through memory, desire, and the slippery nature of truth. Films like Prelude and School of the Dead blurred the line between personal history and poetic reconstruction, while Freak and Marlow Fazon Featuring Yesterday pushed intimacy and identity to their rawest extremes.

The hybrid and avant-garde works showcased here reject the notion that documentary must simply “capture.” Instead, they challenge—contorting time, bending form, and questioning whose stories get told and how. This isn’t just a shift in style; it’s a radical redefinition of storytelling itself, one where fiction and nonfiction are no longer opposing forces but inseparable collaborators.

Leaving the exhibition, I found myself reconsidering what it means to document something. Is truth what we see, what we remember, or what we choose to believe? Doc Fortnight 2025 suggests it might be all of the above, and that’s precisely what makes this era of nonfiction cinema so thrilling.

Judith Godwins’ First European Solo Exhibition Expressions of Life @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents American painter Judith Godwin's first European solo exhibition, Expressions of Life. The exhibition comprises an overview of the artist's work from the early 1950s - the period in which she was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement - to the end of the century. The opening exhibition truly illustrates the artist’s lasting influence over the landscape of American art, despite the challenges she faced as a result of both her sex and sexuality.

Long underappreciated, Godwin’s contribution to the New York avant-garde has undergone recent revision following her inclusion in landmark exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Whitechapel Gallery and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, that offered a reappraisal of women abstractionists of the 20thcentury. Her thesis was – and remained – one of liberation from the conventions of a movement anchored in a language of masculinity and heteronormativity. Starkly aware of the limitations imposed on her by the milieu in which she practiced, Godwin sought to redefine such ‘masculine’ values by way of gestural abstractions that brought a loose geometry into dialogue with nature, dance and Zen philosophy. Her innovative reorientation of the language of modernism remains a radical statement today.

 

Godwin’s interactions with the New York art world began early in her career. As a student at the Mary Baldwin College in her native Virginia, she sought the acquaintance of the modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. Godwin’s invitation to Graham to perform at her college laid the foundations for a lifelong friendship between the two, and Graham’s trailblazing path in a world dominated by men became a touchstone for Godwin. The diaphanous washes of colour, colliding forms and sensuous arcs which characterise Godwin’s works from the early 1950s are indebted to Graham, whose performances she frequented on arrival in New York, often watching from the wings.

 

By 1953 Godwin had settled in New York and was continuing her artistic education under Hans Hofmann, whose influence can be seen in her dynamic approach to composition and colour. Provincetown Summer, 1953, exemplifies Godwin’s facility for translating depth and volume into two dimensions. Introduced to Zen Buddhism by Abstract Expressionist painter Kenzo Okada, such philosophies began to play a larger role in her painting, encapsulated by calligraphic brushwork, redolent too of Franz Kline, another close friend of Godwin’s. As the 1950s continued, the artist’s work took on larger proportions and a darker palette, all the while maintaining an organicism and proclivity for light and space in her evocation of the spiritual in nature. Her vigorous abstractions caught the attention of influential art dealer Betty Parsons, who included Godwin as the youngest artist in the inaugural exhibition at Section Eleven Gallery in 1958 alongside artists including Agnes Martin, and went on to present solo exhibitions of her work in 1959 and 1960.

 

During the 1960s, as Pop Art and Minimalism began their ascent, Godwin distanced herself from the New York art world, retreating instead to Connecticut where she worked restoring 18th-century homes and trained in masonry, carpentry and landscape design. Her return to New York in 1974 saw a change in her paintings, which demonstrated a robust communion with the outdoors and a physicality that invoked the power of nature. With its assertive cardamom red palette and esoteric iconography, Elegy to a Slain Deer, 1975, captures Godwin’s investigation of the relationship between the physical and metaphysical. As in her paintings of the 1950s, her keen appreciation of the corporeal form is palpable in the material presence of her body on the canvas, in body-length arcs of the brush that express her movements with agency. The liberation of the body and its inherent sensuality continued to play a central role in Godwin’s works of the 1980s and 1990s, as articulated by the flesh-inflected palette of The Nest, 1994. Godwin died in 2021 at the age of 91, just as her work began to reach new audiences worldwide. Her lasting legacy is in the transformative nature of her practice, which successfully recalibrated the masculine language of gestural abstraction, shifting representations of womanhood and sexual identity on the canvas.

Expressions of Life is on view through March 9 @ Pippy Houldsworth Gallery 6 Heddon St, London W1B 4BT, UK