Pets & People

'The Truffle Hunters' Is Really About the Dogs. That's the Whole Point

The acclaimed documentary looks like a film about a rare Italian fungus. It's actually an elegy for a working partnership between old men and their dogs that's vanishing.

By Marcus Webb, Products & Living Writer

April 30, 2026 · 4 min read

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On paper, The Truffle Hunters is a documentary about a fungus. A very expensive one, granted, the wild white Alba truffle that grows only in the forests of Italy’s Piedmont region and sells for nearly its weight in gold. But spend ten minutes with the film and it becomes clear that the truffle is a MacGuffin. What the movie is really about is the dogs, and the old men who cannot do any of this without them.

A working partnership, filmed like a painting

Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw spent roughly three years earning their way into a secretive world, and the patience shows. Rather than narrate or explain, the film simply watches, framing scene after scene in warm, available light so that a snowy field or a lamplit kitchen looks less like documentary footage and more like a Renaissance canvas. There is no voiceover, no history lesson, no talking-head tutorial on how truffle hunting works. If you came for a Ken Burns explainer, you will be lost. If you surrender to it, you will be transfixed.

The heart of the film is the relationship between the hunters and their dogs, and it is never sentimentalized because it does not need to be. These are not “working animals” kept at arm’s length. They are family. One hunter shares his dinner with his dog at the table; another bathes with his dog after a long, muddy night in the woods. The men speak to their dogs the way people speak to someone they genuinely love, and the dogs, for their part, clearly adore the job. The scenes of the actual hunt, a dog scrambling through the underbrush, catching a scent, and digging with pure joy, will be instantly familiar to anyone who has watched their own dog unearth a buried treasure in the backyard.

The dog’s-eye view

To capture that joy from the inside, the filmmakers did something ingenious: they mounted small cameras on the dogs themselves. After a false start with high-tech rigs, they ended up commissioning a local cobbler to hand-craft a comfortable leather head harness for each dog, individually fitted, with a mount for a compact camera. The result lets you ride along at ground level through the forest, breathing and digging alongside the dog. It is a small technical choice that quietly makes the film’s whole argument: the dog’s exhilaration is the story.

An elegy, not a travelogue

For all its beauty, the film carries an undertow of loss. The hunters are old, their knowledge is guarded to the point of secrecy, and there is no clear next generation to inherit it. Worse, modern truffle hunting has curdled into something ruled by money, with aggressive competition that occasionally turns to poisoning rivals’ dogs, a horror the film references through the anguish of an affected owner rather than showing it. And climate change looms over everything: as the region warms, forests of the old hardwood trees the truffles depend on are being cut down to plant more profitable vineyards. The way of life on screen is, in a real sense, ending.

That is what makes The Truffle Hunters linger. It is not selling you on a delicacy. It is asking you to notice a specific, ancient kind of partnership between humans and dogs, one built on trust and shared purpose, right as it slips away.

What’s worth knowing now

The film has held up as more than a festival curiosity. It premiered at Sundance in 2020, drew wide critical praise, and landed on the Academy Awards shortlist for Best Documentary Feature, a rare reach for a small, quiet observational film. Off screen, the directors also launched the Truffle Hunters Land Conservation Program to raise money for grassroots efforts to protect the Piedmont truffle forests and the community that depends on them.

If the film is not already on your list, it is easy to find: as of 2026 you can rent or buy The Truffle Hunters on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. Watch it for the truffles if you like. You will stay for the dogs.