RIDM
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“I Don’t Think Movies are Old-Fashioned”: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on His RIDM Retrospective (and Making Art in the Internet Age)
For this year’s 20th anniversary of RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival teamed up with Visions, the city’s experimental documentary film series, for a truly cutting edge retrospective titled “James N. Kienitz Wilkins: Vessels/Containers.” Wilkins, a 25 New Face” of 2016, was honored with four programs containing seven of his works, created from 2012 through 2017. This includes 2012’s nearly two hour Public Hearing, a 16mm, B&W-filmed performance of the transcript from a town hall debate about replacing a Walmart with a Super Walmart, all the way to 2017’s 38-minute Mediums, a medium-length movie made up entirely of medium […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 22, 2017 -
Spotlight on UXdoc at The 20th RIDM (Montreal International Documentary Film Festival)
Running November 9th-19th, this year’s 20th edition of RIDM (or the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival for us non-Québécois) once again proved that big things come in small(ish) packages. Though not nearly as big as that other international doc fest directly on its heels, RIDM’s charm lies precisely in the fact that it’s both wide-ranging and easily navigable. In other words, a docuphile can relax and focus on the inspiring work in front of their eyes at any given moment instead of lamenting over the dozen other screenings, panels and events they’re inevitably missing. Which is not to say there […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 22, 2017 -
We Can’t Make The Same Mistake Twice: At the RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal)
Is it worth developing a taxonomy of film festivals? Would such an order more resemble a food pyramid or a series of loosely overlapping Venn diagrams? At the peak or center of either we can be assured to find prestige world-class festivals à la TIFF or the NYFF. In the 1990s, Montréal had its own to rival and even challenge these, the Montréal World Film Festival. Technically the festival still exists, though as a shell of its former glory following decades of poor programming and mismanagement by the president Serge Losique. As was widely reported in August, this year the […]
by Jesse Cumming on Jan 4, 2017 -
Experience Designing a Surrealist Museum: Loïc Suty on The Unknown Photographer
Receiving its U.S. premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier section is Loic Suty’s The Unknown Photographer, the sole work that blew my mind just a couple of months earlier at Montreal’s RIDM. It’s an incredible, immersive Oculus Rift project inspired by the discovery of a photo album in the Laurentians north of Montreal. Suty’s piece takes us on a WWI photographer’s journey both familiar and foreign, equal parts timely and timeless. Filmmaker spoke with the Montreal-based “experience designer” prior to the piece’s Park City premiere. Filmmaker: So I believe this project originated with an actual […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 31, 2016 -
CPH:DOX 2013
“Mission accomplished.” That might have been the motto of the 2013 edition of CPH:DOX. If, at one point, this doc festival’s liberal definition of “reality” roiled nonfiction traditionalists (it was the fest, after all, that gave its 2009 top award to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers), those days are long since gone. As BBC Storyville’s commissioning editor Nick Fraser commented at a panel on hybrid journalism, there’s almost an expectation by contemporary audiences that documentaries today — not just at CPH:DOX but everywhere — will play with concepts of truth and fiction. “Is there anything left of the tradition of objective […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2014 -
RIDM 2013
Montreal is a city lousy with festivals — even the harsh winter temperatures can’t seem to keep them away. Upon landing in town to attend Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) this November, two music festivals had representatives waiting at the airport, eager to claim me as one of their own. The documentary film festival, founded in 1998 just a few years after the birth of that other, perhaps better-known Canadian nonfiction extravaganza Hot Docs, has carved out a niche for itself, developing an audience eager for documentaries in the vein of their Toronto counterparts. Screenings and panels were […]
by Farihah Zaman on Jan 8, 2014 -
Gael García Bernal on Documentaries
“Let’s go back to the time when there was VHS,” says Gael García Bernal at the RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal or the Montreal International Documentary Festival). “In those days to see a documentary in Mexico your friend would buy a movie in New York or Amsterdam or wherever [and] they would come up to you and say, ‘If you want to see this…’” Inevitably, a documentary fell into the young García Bernal’s hands. “I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember feeling there was something beyond an investigation, that it had a bigger scope, a […]
by Allan Tong on Nov 27, 2013
