‘The Truffle Hunters’ Review: Oscars Shortlist Doc Is a Beautiful Allegory for a Dying World
The search for the elusive white Alba truffle in northern Italy is a fragile process for everyone involved, and this documentary finds the poetry in that delicate dance.
There’s a key scene in “The Truffle Hunters” that finds one of the movie’s elderly subjects, who has spent a lifetime digging for mushrooms in Northern Italy, asking a priest what to expect in the afterlife. The answer is he’ll probably keep hunting for truffles. Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s touching, wistful documentary turns on the deceptive simplicity of these isolated lives. Mapping out a complex market of buyers and sellers who rely on the endless scavenging of forest-dwelling figures, it’s a cycle of life only interrupted by death. All they can do is plow ahead.
Dweck and Kershaw don’t build a narrative so much as an accumulation of encounters that often lead to the visually immersive thrill of watching a culinary ecosystem come to life. In the wilds…