- Hello, welcome to a special q&a recording
of "Truffle Hunters."
Playing as a special event
at the 45th Toronto International Film Festival.
My name is Thom Powers,
and I'm TIFF's documentary programmer,
celebrating my 15th year at the festival.
I'm honored to be here with the film's directors,
Michael Dweck in New York City,
and Gregory Kershaw,
who's joining us from Stockholm, Sweden,
and making their first appearance at the festival.
I want to give a big thanks to our audience
for being a part of TIFF during these unprecedented times.
We are grateful for your support
to keep TIFF going for years to come.
This film is eligible for the People's Choice Award,
and you can vote for your favorite films
at tiff.net/vote.
Gregory and Michael thank you again for being here.
I wanna start by asking,
how did you get drawn into the world
of these truffle hunters?
- Well, we had edited last film,
"The Last Race," in Copenhagen.
And that was in August.
After that we kind of needed a break.
So I decided to kind of go
to the mountains of northern Italy,
but there was no tourists.
And, Greg happened to be in the exact same place
where I was talking, for a month.
He ended up in the exact same place in northern Italy.
And when I was there,
someone had said,
"Why are you here in August?
"You should be here in November, which is truffle season."
And I said,
"what, truffles?
"What are this?"
And they said,
"Well, it's just these sort of things look like potatoes.
"They're very expensive.
"They come from the ground."
"So who, who finds these things?"
And they said,
"We don't know.
"All we know is I put 100 euros
"in this little wooden box at night.
"And the next morning, the truffle appears,
"and that's all we know."
(Thom laughs)
And when I talked to Greg, I said,
"well, this could be just, a fascinating story."
We're always drawn to, these subcultures,
these societal enclaves on the edge of kind of extinction
and we went back,
spent two weeks just digging into this place.
And it took about a year,
for them to finally let us in to this magical place.
And that's how it all started.
- Yeah, there was,
I think when we both went there the first time,
and it was just this amazing coincidence
that we had both been in the same area, really by chance.
And we came back and we were talking about
and there was,
there was kind of a magic there.
We didn't really know,
we had heard these stories of these truffle hunters.
And that was intriguing, It was mystery.
But there was this, feeling of a place
that had kind of
been untouched by time.
And it still had so much of its character
and its culture intact.
And it was we both felt this.
It was this powerful draw that brought us back there.
We felt we needed to go and find something there.
And it this mystery of the truffle hunters
kind of gave us a story that we latched onto
and little by little we discovered this incredible world
that really most people even in the area
have never seen before.
- And nobody admitted it.
Nobody.
Everybody we spoke to said there's no such thing
as truffle hunters.
That no.
If we ask someone that said,
"This guy's a truffle hunter, go to his house."
We'd go to his house.
Say to him ,"we want to talk to you. "
He said
"No, I what you're talking about.
(Thom laughs)
We'd go to a priest in the town.
We said, "Let's go to a priest."
Priest said,
"Oh, yeah, this guy's a truffle hunter.
"We know it was 'cause Christmas,
"he gives me a truffle every Christmas."
We'd go to his house,
"No but I don't know what the priest is talking about."
This is what he kept telling me and touching me and .
He said. (Thom laughs)
"We have to say,
"this is the story."
- Are you, do you speak Italian?
Were you able to communicate that way?
Or were you need
to rely on translators? - No.
We had a translator with us,
who became our co-producer also.
And also they don't really speak a Italian,
they speak dialect, Piedmontese.
So that was even more challenging,
but she comes from that region,
so she was very helpful to us.
Well we spoke Spanish to them, which was no help at all.
- So what were some of the ways
in which you overcame their resistance?
- I think. - We spent.
- Oh okay.
We spent, it took, as Mike said,
it took about a year to get into this world.
And it I think,
we told them that we were interested
in making a film about their lives.
The people that were filming,
I think they had an idea of what a movie was.
But they really, their lives are really free
from most of the modern technology
that all of our lives are so inundated with.
And that's, I guess what part of what made
exploring their world attractive.
But so they didn't really,
I don't think they, and most people don't understand
the process of making a documentary.
It takes a really long time.
So we made this,
we took our first trip,
and we told them after about being exploring
their world for two weeks.
And we said that we're gonna come back in about a month.
And they said, "Sure".
They didn't really believe us.
But then we came back, and we stayed for another month.
And then we went back and we stayed for another month.
And it was a process of I guess,
gradually earning their trust
through often drinking a lot of coffee or red wine,
and sharing meals with them.
And through that time that we spent with them,
they realized,
I think they realized we would show them a little
little pieces of what we were filming.
And they understood what we were trying to do.
And they invited us in more, more and more.
We got to see the inside of their house,
and they would introduce us to their friends
and pretty soon we were sort of
part of their family dynamics.
- And also they,
that was a line that took a while to cross.
They didn't want to invite us to their homes.
That was a big challenge.
We always said,
"Let's meet and talk."
They said, "No, let's go.
"Let's meet in the village.
"We'll meet in the market."
And so we did that.
And we said
"Can we just see your house?"
And I think they were, they felt embarrassed.
Because from what they've heard about Americans,
they thought that most Americans are extremely wealthy.
And although they haven't been exposed to many things,
exposed the newspapers in the town,
but not to movies or television at all.
So we had to kind of overcome that.
A lot of, and we had a van.
The crew is very small.
It's Greg and I and some photographers.
We have a sound person,
but is also our translator,
and a big blue van that we're driving.
And the van says, "A big friendly blue van",
in Italian.
We pull up people's houses,
and we have in the back,
wine and raw meat typically.
We lived above a butcher.
And we always filled up with raw meat in the morning
and that was a lot of times our currency,
with this community.
We presented them with some sausages that day
that helps getting us closer.
And finally, we crossed that line into their home.
And that was a big breakthrough for us.
- We would bring sausages
and then we would end up with,
they would give us five bottles of wine
that they had been making in their basement.
And we'd end up with a crate of pomegranates.
The people that,
there's just this incredible once you break,
this once you break into their world
and gain their trust,
there's just this incredible warmth in the area.
And this desire
to share in so many ways.
And I think ultimately they,
when they understood what we were trying to do,
they wanted to share their world with us.
'Cause they realized how,
they realize how important what they're doing
is in the world right now.
They realize all the changes that are happening in the world
and they realize that
they don't think of themselves as heroic
but I think they understand
that they've held on to something very, very special.
This connection to nature,
this passion, to find this thing that comes from nature
and this community that all those things that are just,
they're very rare in the world these days.
- And I think they wanted us to pay our dues, as well.
We went out with in them in the mud at night.
In the cold, in the snow, in the rain.
We were there all year.
We were there for three years.
So we, kept coming back.
We just kept
they kept testing us more and more.
The characters are walking 20 miles a night.
In the dark, with no lights at all.
In the mud in the rain in very dangerous mountains
in the high mountains.
We can't keep up with them.
I think that was part of it.
- Now, it sounds like when you started this project
that you didn't have a lot of experience
with truffles or maybe zero experience with truffles.
In the course of making it,
have you gotten to know to have an appetite for truffles
and gotten to know that food better?
- No.
- It's an expensive habit.
(men laughing) - That's right.
Usually white truffles.
- Yeah.
- We do.
We love them and, we've come to be,
now we can kind of evaluate a truffle.
Someone gives us sometimes,
someone will say to us,
"Here's a truffle,
"I wanna buy this truffle."
We say,
"Yeah, you know what?
"You didn't.
"That's not so good."
It's an honor.
And because we're in the auction,
we understood that we were filming truffle fair
for three years.
We understood how to evaluate.
The judge that you see in that plate of pasta
with scraping the beautiful white truffle
we were with him a lot.
He was teaching us a ton.
And he has this nose.
that man has been doing this for 15 years.
And before that a wine taster for 10 years,
before that a chocolate taster for 10 years,
before the cheese taster for eight years .
- So going to live with him is.
- Not easy.
(men laugh)
- The truffles are they're served often in these very fancy,
these Michelin starred restaurants around the world.
But the best way to eat them is just incredibly simply.
I'd never had a real truffle before I started this project.
I'd had truffle oil,
which most people think it's that's what truffles are like.
But it's completely different.
It's a very,
there's actually no truffle in truffle oil,
it's completely artificial.
So the best way to really have truffles
is just really simply over over fried eggs
or just simple egg pasta.
Just with nothing, on it but but olive oil or butter.
And I would say the best truffles that we had on the trip
we had some amazing experiences.
We got to go to some really nice higher end restaurants.
But the best truffles,
were we would come back with the hunters
that we were out with all night
and they would fry up some eggs in a cast iron pan,
on their gas stove.
And they would just shave the truffles right over them
in the morning that we had just found,
and it was incredible.
It's other otherworldly.
- It was freezing.
They put wood into the fire.
We had been out for 10 hours probably at night.
(Michael clears throat)
They go out typically when it gets dark
and they come back when the sun comes up.
So nobody can see where they go.
And they just magically appear in the woods.
These dogs look like they're just walking pets.
- I wanna ask you about the dogs in the film.
They say in the show business,
never work with children or animals.
(Mike and Gregory laugh)
It seems like you had enlisted the dogs
to be your camera operators at some point.
What was that about?
(Michel and Gregory laugh)
We wanted to give the audience the point of view
of the dogs sensation, and the dogs,
not just their point of view,
but also how they think how they act.
So we thought how can we do that?
Let's put a camera in the dog's head.
So it took us about two months
and worked with a local cobbler,
who was also living downstairs
where our apartment was.
And we kept going to him with these pieces of fabric
and saying,
"Can you do this?"
That kind of piece of leather
and a piece of suede
And we kept.
We listened to everybody in this town to figure out
this very sophisticated rig made out of very,
very traditional materials.
And we think we made,
Greg, what do you think we probably made?
10 of these things or 11?
And then we realized.
- Tried so many. - Dogs have different
just nose and ears and but it worked.
At the end, it was just a very sophisticated rig
made very traditional material.
Everybody helped me at rivets.
There's a local riveter,
and we get to get them to put sheet metal in it to bend.
For the shape of the head to hide under the leather.
So we went to a sheet metal person,
we found suede, a certain kind of lamb suede
because the other suedes didn't work.
But it worked.
At the end it was really magical.
That's part of that town.
Everybody got to know us really quickly.
We didn't really realize how many people knew us
always going village to village
until it actually feels
"Oh you're the guys with the van."
- And it did.
(men laugh)
- There is an underlying concern about the climate crisis
in this film.
Can you talk about more what you witnessed
with your own eyes of how climate change
is affecting this way of life?
- Yeah.
- I mean that the second year that we were filming,
there were virtually no truffles.
There was a drought.
It hadn't rained for months,
probably six months.
And as a result, the price of truffles
had it was unprecedent.
I think it was over $10,000 a kilo.
And that's, that's just, climate change is a big factor.
And all the truffle hunters talk about how every year
there are fewer and fewer truffles.
There's other factors too.
There's deforestation in the area.
There's agricultural pollution,
the area is incredibly beautiful.
It's filled with some of the best vineyards
in the entire world.
That's where Barolo and Barbaresco
all these very fancy wines come from.
And it looks beautiful,
but they cut down the forests to create those vineyards.
And then also to maintain the vineyards.
There's a lot of agricultural pollution
and all of that is having a huge impact
on the amount of truffles that grow in the area.
Some of the truffle hunters that we filmed with like Carlo,
he talked about, he's 86,
and he talked about when he was a kid,
on his farm, the same land that he continues to,
that he still works to this day.
He would follow his father as he plowed the fields
and truffles would just pop up like potatoes.
I mean, they were really plentiful.
And now, I mean, it's like finding gold.
And so they become, they're becoming more and more scarce,
but the demand for them is increasing.
It just it used to be something I think
Europeans were interested in
and now it's Americans and it's Asians.
And it's really the whole world that wants these truffles.
They just grow and the white Alba truffle grows
in this very thin strip of land in Europe.
So there's a tremendous amount of pressure
that's driving up the price
and also driving up the competition,
which is what caused One of the things
that you saw in the film
that there's people that are poisoning dogs
because they're just the competition is that fierce
and they're becoming that scarce.
- We should also explain that the white truffle,
it grows, it attaches itself to the root of oak trees.
And those oak trees are, they have to be very old
and those, and oak trees don't really
produce any revenue for a landowner.
And that's the reason why there it's so easy to strip
a piece of land.
There was a part of that we filmed.
It didn't make the film where a truffle hunter
calls us crying on the phone and says
"You have to get down here now.
"They've just stripped an entire 200 year old oak trees."
And we got down there it was hailing,
and we did film and he was crying and pleading
with this guy with a chainsaw
who is who just had paid 200 euros to strip all these trees
that he's been hunting on three generations
on this piece of land gone.
There was nothing but stumps by the time we got there.
So we've also started,
We should talk about right.
We started a fund a trust.
Where we're going to be,
as a trusted definitely we're going to be donating money
to acquire a forest.
Raw forest land that we know is already available
where we've actually shot the film.
So that it can't be deforested.
Just giving we're giving
it back to them and it's been their land
to hunt freely on.
It'll be self policed.
But you won't be able to to cut trees down.
- Well, that's great to hear about for as we wrap up here.
For people who want to keep following the progress
of this film, where should they look?
- We have a Facebook page The Truffle Hunters film.
We have Twitter for The Truffle film.
And that's probably the best place.
- All right, well, we're really pleased
to show this film this year.
Especially this year when we're all cooped up inside
and could use a chance to get reconnected to the land.
Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw,
Thank you for this film.
Thank you for being here.
- Thank you Thom. - Thank you Thom.
such an honor
- Such an honor, thank you so much.