In the forests of northern Italy, a few elderly men still walk out with their dogs to look for the white Alba truffle. The Truffle Hunters, a 2020 documentary from Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, keeps to their unhurried pace for 84 minutes.
What is The Truffle Hunters about?
The white Alba truffle is counted among the most expensive ingredients on any menu, and it has resisted every effort of modern science to cultivate it. Nobody can farm it; somebody has to find it. The people who know how are a shrinking circle of men in their seventies and eighties in Piedmont, working woods whose best spots are kept secret. The documentary stays close to them and to the dogs whose noses do the real work, treating each pairing of man and animal as a partnership of long standing. What emerges is less a report on a luxury food than a portrait of people who are plainly happy in what they do, living on fragile land that seems to have slipped out of the present day.
About the cast
There are no actors here in the usual sense. The people on screen are the hunters and their neighbours themselves: Carlo Gonella, Sergio Cauda, Aurelio Conterno, Angelo Gagliardi, Maria Cicciù, Gianfranco Curti, Paolo Stacchini and Piero Botto are all credited. Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw share the directing credit.
Context & significance
The Truffle Hunters is a co-production of the United States, Greece and Italy, released in 2020 and catalogued as a documentary. Its subject gives it an unusual shape for the form. The truffle cannot be grown to order, so the knowledge of where and how to find it lives only in the people who hold it, and those people are few and old. That makes the film a record of a tradition as much as of an ingredient: what is passed on, what is kept back, and what may vanish with the generation that carries it. The film has been warmly received by critics and audiences alike.
Watching The Truffle Hunters on Ktime
The Truffle Hunters is on K-Time with a Persian dub and with Persian subtitles, so the conversations can be followed in Farsi audio or read as Farsi text over the original voices. A K-Time account login is needed to watch, while this page stays free to read. The service is designed around Persian-speaking viewers outside Iran, and its menus and player are in Farsi.