Exploring a near-extinct way of life, The Truffle Hunters finds cinematic gold. BY RAY ROGERS
Accompanied by canine scouts, truffle hunters seek their precious quarry in the forests of Italy.
same region of Italy, in Piedmont, a mountainous, tiny little village. What we discovered was that there’s nobody there in August, probably except for us. People were saying, “You should come back in November when it’s truffle season,” and we were like “Truffles? Where do those come from?” They said, “We don’t know, there’s these men that dig in the mountains. that come out at night. Nobody knows who they are. But they have the truffles.” We said, “How do you know?” And they said, “For example I put this wooden box outside of my cafe, and in the morning truffles appear.” That told us it was an interesting story to explore. It took us a long time, about a year, until we found the real truffle hunters, and they trusted us to give us access into their world. Then we spent another couple years on this film. GREGORY KERSHAW: So much of the world is becoming more and more the same. Technology is taking over local cultures and indigenous cultures. One thing Mike and I are both looking for is cultures that have held onto traditions, an identity that is rooted in their past and a connection to nature. When we stumbled upon this place, we saw the kernel of the story and the thought of the possibility of the culture that maintained all that, and that’s what got us excited about filming there.
Operatic music swells as Paolo Stacchin, the mighty truffle judge, awaits a dish of tagliolini, egg and freshly shaved tartufo bianco at Michelin-starred Da Francesco in the town of Cherasco in Northern Italy. He is a man of rarefied taste, enjoying the olfactory pleasures of this delicacy. The moments of heightened senses are multiple in The Truffle Hunters, the new documentary from Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, not the least of which are the lifeaffirming experiences the octogenarian men themselves and their devoted dogs savor while on the chase of the buried culinary treasure: the elusive white Alba truffle, so rare today that they are worth their weight in gold. Purist spoke to Dweck (a longtime Montauk habitué whose 2004 photo book The End remains a classic) and Kershaw about the three years they spent filming this story. RAY ROGERS: What a rich topic to explore on so many levels. It’s a feast for the eyes. What inspired you to tell the story about this group of men? MICHAEL DWECK: We worked together on the last film, The Last Race [about a small-town stock-car racing track in Riverhead, New York]. These are both worlds that were at the risk of vanishing. When we finished editing The Last Race we were in Copenhagen in August 2017. We were looking for a place to just disappear and we wanted to take a break after the long shooting schedule. Greg and I, without knowing, had each ended up in the exact
RR: What a great area to spend a few years of one’s life. MD: It was the polar opposite of the Riverhead Raceway, foodwise. 92
Courtesy of Sony Pictures
HIFF
A VISUAL FEAST
