84 min | PG-13 | March 5, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
Old men hunt the white Alba truffle in the forests of Piedmont, guarding their spots like buried treasure and trusting only their dogs. Buyers want the secret and the harvest. The men would sooner take it to the grave.
The Truffle Hunters drops into the forests of Piedmont in northern Italy. A handful of old men hunt the rare white Alba truffle. They work at night with their dogs and they guard their locations like state secrets. Dealers and middlemen circle them, eager to buy a fungus that sells for a fortune to restaurants and collectors. Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw build the film around a single tension. The men hold knowledge that the market wants and that they refuse to surrender.
Aurelio Conterno lives alone with his dog and talks to the animal as a confidant, worrying aloud about who will care for it when he is gone. Carlo Gonella carries himself with the stubborn patience of a man who has hunted these hills for decades. Sergio Cauda treats his dog as a partner and not a tool. Maria Cicciù speaks for the wives who endure the obsession and fear the poisoned bait that rivals scatter on the trails to kill the dogs. None of these people performs for the camera. Each lives inside a routine that has outlasted everyone who taught it.
Dweck and Kershaw shoot the film like a gallery of paintings. The camera locks in place and holds. Interiors glow with the deep shadows and warm light of Dutch still life, and the frames sit so still that a man eating his dinner becomes a composition worth studying. Then the directors strap a small camera to a dog and let it tear through the underbrush. The forest blurs and bounces and the perspective drops to the ground where the work actually happens. The cut between the painterly stillness and the dog-cam chaos is the whole movie in miniature.
The Truffle Hunters is about a world that is ending and the men who refuse to hand it over. Their secrecy is not greed. It is the last form of control they have over something that money has turned into a commodity. Dweck and Kershaw never push the elegy too hard. They let the dogs and the dinners and the silences carry the weight. The film mourns a vanishing way of life without pretending it can be saved.