An elderly man in an autumnal landscape, his four dogs dashing up and down the hills, chopping away the overgrown blackberry bushes with a machete when they stop to sniff intently. It is twilight, it is quiet, we only hear the man chatting incessantly to his animals, an unintelligible mixture of commands and compliments. The documentary The Truffle Hunters (VPRO) is a painting of almost an hour and a half.
Birba, Biri, Fiona, Titina, Charlie. That’s what the dogs are called, they are not of a special breed or specially trained, they are actually quite average animals, but for their owners they are priceless. And not just because they help to search for solidified gold chunks in the ground. The white Alba truffle, the most expensive species in the world, can be found from late summer in the woods of Piedmont, Italy. The mushroom, for that is what it is, seems to grow deep between the roots of poplars, lindens and willows. No one will tell you exactly, a little truffle hunter would rather die than reveal his whereabouts. The dogs rely on the strong, garlicky smell and are trained not to eat the truffle when they dig it up, but to exchange it for a biscuit.
The bosses are elderly Italian men, most well into their eighties. The search for truffles is their passion and their life, their dog colleague and companion and that is how they treat the animal. Fiona joins in the bath after a nightly search, Birba is allowed to slobber the leftover soup from the plate on the table. Titina is blessed by the priest so that in good health she will continue to smell as she does.
Crackling fireplace
Whether this is another documentary or a fully staged postcard film, I can’t say. The eye glides from miniature to scene to vista, with one light source illuminating man and dog. Like a painting, as I said, by Caravaggio. A flashlight, a crackling fire, the glow of the setting sun, the headlights of a car. Deep red tomatoes are washed by hand, white grapes in wicker baskets are tipped into a wooden press, the wood-burning oven in the kitchen is fired up, a white lump of truffle is brushed clean with a mushroom brush. Just to make it clear that life here, in this Italian village of San Damiano d’Asti, was wonderful before time came to a standstill.
Of course there is a downside. The white truffle has always been pricey, even when it was still a delicacy of the region. Searchers, buyers and brokers traditionally play a shadowy game with special prices ‘just for you’ and agreements about who can sell to whom. The boundaries between everyone’s hunting grounds are not written anywhere, but every villager knows exactly where they walk.
It is not made explicit anywhere, but it is likely that now that restaurants from all over the world want the exclusive truffle on the menu, prices are skyrocketing. Three scrubbed truffles of 280, 180 and 140 grams should raise around 4,000 euros in total. And that is a friendly price from the intermediary. Finder and dog are very satisfied with five hundred euro notes for a nice copy.
With such amounts, a night out with your dog is no longer a hobby, but work. And not harmless either. Competitors raid other people’s property and hide poisonous bait from each other’s dogs in the hills. I just couldn’t understand what the highest bid was for the largest truffle at the auction. But it was many times more than the 5,000 euros that Aurelio (84) was offered by a stranger for bastard Birba. He didn’t worry about it.