It’s a documentary about grumpy old men and their dogs. But scratch beneath the surface and you find …. truffles.
The Truffle Hunters is highly recommended. It documents an enigmatic underground delicacy that only the uncanny nose of a trained dog can detect.
Sometimes the camera is a fly on the wall catching the quotidian conversations of these frazzled men with their terriers and their labs, at other times it shows you the pov of the dog as it leaps from the truck and scurries through the beautiful North Italian undergrowth to frenetically paw for some lumps of the subterranean fungus.
Some forage for their own table others to sell. The market is lucrative and comes with its own ecosystem of middle men , appraisers , sellers and consumers.
And this unleashes the dark forces that cause dogs to be poisoned with strychnine , suspicion and hostility amongst old acquaintances , turf wars and temptations.
It reminded me of another documentary I watched earlier — Taming The Garden. This one is darker as it documents a vanity project of a billionaire to populate his garden with the most stately of trees from all over his country (Georgia).
So contractors scout, stalk , dig , scaffold , uproot , raise and transfer them one by one.
The telling visual of this movie is when they show a beautiful tree in all its arboreal glory rising above what looks like an ocean. Actually it’s a lake and the tree is being transported on a flatbed shipping container to its new home in the crazy billionaire’s own private forest.