The Living Landscape of Contemporary Canadian Documentary Cinema
This collaboration between the Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) and the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) brings together a selection of films that reflect the vitality, diversity and rich artistic currents of contemporary Canadian documentary cinema.
Rooted in a shared belief that documentary cinema extends beyond representation, becoming a fertile space for invention and experimentation, this programme showcases works that reimagine reality and demonstrate the discipline's capacity to cross genres, geographies, histories and ways of seeing and connecting.
TIDF's gracious invitation to RIDM is grounded in the belief that our curatorial experience and perspective can offer meaningful insight into the evolving landscape of documentary filmmaking in Canada today.
At RIDM, we approach this landscape with an acute awareness of the colonial histories embedded in the territory, a land inhabited for millennia by Indigenous nations, and with a recognition that these histories continue to inform questions of narrative sovereignty and representation that shape contemporary cinematic practice. We seek films that articulate strong aesthetic and narrative visions, works that engage with human geography, interrogate inherited notions of culture and belonging, and challenge dominant forms of representation through inventive filmic languages.
All the films featured in this programme were previously presented at past editions of RIDM, reflecting the festival's role as both an international meeting point and a springboard for talent. Based in Québec, a territory shaped by cultural crossings and ongoing questions of layered identities, RIDM's programming is nourished by the diversity of its voices, backgrounds and perspectives. Diversity extends not only to who speaks, but to how cinema itself can speak through observational patience, poetic abstraction, sensory immersion, archival reconfiguration, or the personal essay in order to propose new ways of imagining community, inclusion and cinematic expression.
Across five screening programmes, the films gathered here form a constellation rather than a single narrative. What connects them is a shared attention to place, memory and lived experience, as well as a desire to push documentary cinema beyond fixed definitions. Each film offers a distinct entry point into this landscape, while resonating with others through subtle echoes and contrasts.
The Blueberry Blues (2025) by Andrés Livov, is a collective portrait of a rural community in Lac- Saint-Jean (Québec), bound together by the cultivation of blueberries, an emblem of resilience in the face of climate change, economic pressure and shifting agricultural models. The Soldier's Lagoon (2024) by Pablo Álvarez Mesa follows, unfolding as a sensorial journey through Colombia's páramo, where landscapes carry the layered traces of environmental, political and colonial histories.
A dialogue between nature, time and perception emerges in the pairing of Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya (2024) by Malena Szlam and Geographies of Solitude (2022) by Jacquelyne Mills. Working with 16mm film and rich soundscapes, both films invite an attentive, embodied form of viewing, one that approaches the natural world not as spectacle, but as a space of care, memory and latent transformation.
In the first programme of shorts, questions of territory and erasure take on sharper political resonance in Tuktuit: Caribou (2025), Traces (2023) and Holiday Native Land (2023). Lindsay McIntyre's Tuktuit: Caribou explores Inuit relationships to land through textures, materials and listening rather than explanation. In Traces, Chantal Partamian reanimates fragmented archival images to assert the presence of queer women erased from collective memory in times of war.
Holiday Native Land, by Nicolas Renaud and Brian Virostek, turns colonial tourism archives against themselves, revealing how images of leisure conceal histories of domination that continue to shape the present.
The second programme turns inward, without losing sight of the world beyond the frame. Ode to Loneliness (2022) by Rawane Nassif transforms a hotel room into a site of visual and sonic play, where solitude becomes a space of invention. The Truss Arch (2021) by Sonya Stefan unfolds beneath a bridge linking Canada and the United States, blurring borders through movement, memory and gesture. While Like a Spiral (2024) by Lamia Chraibi echoes with the voices of migrant domestic workers in Beirut, whose testimonies rise against systems of erasure, insisting on presence, dignity and survival.
At the heart of this programme lies RIDM's commitment to both emerging and established filmmakers, accompanying their work through mentorship, screenings and long-term support. International exchanges such as this collaboration with TIDF are essential to that mission. They allow films to travel, to be re-seen and reinterpreted, and to enter into dialogue with new audiences and cultural contexts. This showcase is therefore both a presentation of films and an invitation to encounter documentary cinema as a living, evolving form, shaped by movement, exchange and connection. We are honoured to share these works with Taiwanese audiences and to continue building bridges between our two festivals through the language of cinema.
