Carlo, Carlo!’ Maria’s lyrical voice carries across the wooded hills, calling her 88-year-old husband to come in for dinner. But Carlo isn’t listening. He’s busy in the forest, his trusty dog beside him, searching for truffles.

This evocative scene – drenched in the golden light of autumn – is brilliantly captured in a new film, The Truffle Hunters, by directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw. The American film-makers spent three years immersing themselves in the time-honoured ways of life in the villages of Piedmont, in the north of Italy, to understand the mysteries of truffle-hunting.