January 10, 2025

By Winnie Wang

In addition to hosting what was, until recently, North America’s largest documentary film festival, Hot Docs, Canada is home to other distinct documentary festivals stretching from coast to coast, bearing unique identities and superlatives of their own. Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montreal, or the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), taking place each November, might be appointed as the most daring or innovative festival, with its bold and visionary programming. The films populating the festival are artistically driven, demanding in both content and form, often expanding or drawing attention to the expectations and beliefs we hold about documentaries. As an audience member, you may find yourself asking how a particular film fits into the context of a documentary festival, or questioning the degree to which the work is scripted given the dialogue or camerawork. You might emerge from a screening changed by the glacial pacing of a film, or gain perspective from one that spans eons and continents yet delivers its tale with expediency.

RIDM could stake a claim to being Canada’s most intimate and democratic documentary festival. Though screenings unfold across a handful of venues, other events—parties, concerts, panel discussions, and workshops—converge at various theatres and rooms in the Cinémathèque Québécoise. There you’re likely to stumble upon fellow audience members, filmmakers, and industry representatives between films and meetings. Spontaneous lunch plans emerge, former colleagues reunite, and international friendships develop. Where other festivals attempt to lure attendees with grand pitching forums and prominent decision-makers, which inevitably redirect power away from artists, RIDM seeks to organize encounters that recognize the value of filmmakers, producers, financiers, distributors, sales agents, critics, and programmers alike. Under the lyrics projected at karaoke night, we’re all equal—at least equally judged by our vocal aptitudes.

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This year, the National Feature Competition included seven films from Quebec, including two international co-productions that offered a range of subjects and formal approaches. Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted juxtaposes a recordings of intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers against scenes of stillness and devastation in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa’s The Soldier’s Lagoon employs 16mm landscape footage, saturated in bright oranges and blues, to revisit the spectres of Colombia’s past and present.

In Archéologie de la lumière, Sylvain L’Espérance silently observes the beauty of Quebec’s Côte-Nord region, located on the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The film recalls the patience of Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude and Vincent Barré and Pierre Creton’s 7 Walks with Mark Brown—experimental documentaries that similarly contemplate the natural features of an ecosystem and direct our attention to unusual textures, shapes, colours, and how they are touched and changed by light. In this sense, L’Espérance attends to not only the terrains of land and water, but sky too, expertly uniting these domains in each shot. Captured over varied times of the day, the film considers the aesthetics of the landscape beyond the picturesque beauty of the travel postcard. How many ways can the sun cast light upon tall, windswept reeds? Do we imagine these tall grasses in motion, the nearby water rippling, even in the darkness of the evening? Unaccompanied by narration or music, L’Archéologie presents this unique environment with minimal interference, retreating into the unexpected details of the landscape to study how light and scale can alter our perceptions of familiar sceneries and rhythms.

Contrasted with the cool greys and blues of L’Espérance’s coastal geography, Jean-François Lesage sets Parmi les montagnes et les ruisseaux (Among Mountains and Streams) in dense woodlands abundant with warm greens and browns. In Gaspesia, a region along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River, painter Meng Huang and writer Ma Jian traverse a vast forest with no particular destination in mind, though their comportment is by no means restful or leisurely. The exiled Chinese travellers hike over steep hills and devise makeshift river crossings with rocks while massaging memories of their formations as artists, political awakenings during adolescence, and experiences with state censorship and repression. Upon nightfall, they return to the refuge of a small wooden cabin where conversations continue over dinner and tea. Though Lesage’s two on-screen subjects are compelling, the film never fully recovers from the heavy presence of the filmmaker, whose motivations for staging this journey remain unclear. Absent of wider context or knowledge of his positionality, it’s difficult to fully embrace the premise without reservations over Lesage’s relationship to land, location, and displacement.

On the spectrum of possibilities for nonfiction filmmaking, Tout Sur Margo would be located somewhere near the frontier of fiction. Margaux Latour, co-director of the film with Yann-Manuel Hernandez, plays Margo, an aspiring French actor on a troubled film project in Portugal that seems to be sinking faster than she can bail the water out. With a recently flatlined social and romantic life back in Paris, Margo commits to her creative and professional ambitions, rehearsing lines and attempting varied methods of delivery in a coastal town she must call home for three months. When her co-star Hugo arrives at their shared apartment, his free-spirited, impulsive nature at once irritates and charms her. This dynamic echoes that found between the titular friends of Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara—a Canadian drama that similarly explores the thrilling relationship between two artists with opposing dispositions. Matt offers spontaneity, injects a sense of playfulness, and models another way of living for the controlled and tense Mara. In Tout Sur Margo, though, Latour and Hernandez orient their characters toward friendship, insisting on a platonic relationship of creation and collaboration even when things graduate in intensity. The result is a refreshing portrait of intimacy without traditional romance, or perhaps of the ways that friendship can resemble the shape of romance while taking its own discrete form.

Stretching across landscapes and degrees of invention, the festival’s selection of Canadian films affirms Quebec as a site of experimentation. The documentaries showcased here display artists who experiment outside the constraints of market concerns while trusting the intelligence of their audience. In its enthusiastic inclusion of these works, RIDM conceives of documentary as an apparatus for transformation not only through outspoken politically engaged films, but by highlighting alternative aesthetics, forms of knowledge, and ways of moving through the world that subtly embed themselves in our everyday gestures and desires.

Winnie Wang is the 2024 Telefilm Canada Emerging Critic Award winner.