Ana Alice de Morais, Artistic Co-Director at RIDM, the Montreal International Documentary Festival, and Marc Gauthier, Executive Director, reflected to BDE on their 2025 Cannes Docs experience. “This was our sixth Docs In Progress [in Cannes] in seven years,” Gauthier said of what is now becoming almost an annual event. “Cannes Docs has really managed to create a home for creative documentary…it’s a special thing in this global madness.”
Canada’s showcase at Cannes Docs, organised by Telefilm Canada in partnership with RIDM, put the spotlight on an intriguing mix of projects.
De Morais agrees, pointing to successes from previous years. “Almost all the projects we bring have had very successful careers,” De Morais noted. “We prioritise films that are at the final stage of production and that can really be out in the open soon.”
The usual mix of festival programmers and distributors attended the showcase. The hope now is that the four titles presented will be shown internationally.
The films under the spotlight were Brett Story’s archival doc, The Production Of The World, looking at the life and career of radical art critic, John Berger; indigenous filmmaker Banchi Hanuse’s We Shall Eat When The River is Full about the disappearance of sputc (eulachon) — a fish vital to the Nuxalk way of life; Andrea Bussmann’s Skin Of The Sky, and Concrete Turned To Sand by Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora, a film exploring the lives of oyster farmers in British Columbia.
Successes that have emerged from past Canada showcases include Justine Harbonnier’s debut feature doc, Caiti Blues, about a young singer living in an artist’s community in New Mexico, which was presented in Cannes in 2022 before going on to win a Special Jury Prize as Best Canadian feature at Hot Docs a year later. Meanwhile, Yintah, the debut feature by Michael Toledano, Jennifer Wickham and Brenda Michell, went on to win awards everywhere form Hot Docs to Millennium Docs Against Gravity.
De Morais and Gauthier are also planning a new collaboration with Taiwan for the 2025 edition of RIDM, running 20-30 November. The initiative is being organised in collaboration with Taiwan Docs, a part of the Taiwan Film & Audiovisiual Institute.
There are obvious reasons why Taiwan and Canada might want to share notes and work together. Both are countries with potentially menacing near neighbours – but the organisers say this is not the main reason for the focus (which has been in the planning for some time).
RIDM works closely with federal cultural agency Telefilm Canada on the Cannes event. “They give us full liberty for the curation of the programme [in Cannes],” de Morais observes.
“We [RIDM] have the expertise; we have the network. They trust us to reflect a certain type of documentary creation,” Gauthier says. “For creative docs, there is a special interest in getting festival selections and there are a number of very important festivals that are here.”
As the two execs acknowledge, a paradox is becoming evident when it comes to documentary distribution. De Morais has noticed that festival screenings at RIDM itself are now getting bigger audiences than even before the pandemic. “It [a festival screening] is an event. People come to meet each other; they come to meet the talent as well, the filmmakers that we bring.”
In the movie theatres, though, it’s a different story. In Canada as elsewhere, docs have been struggling to attract audiences in cinemas in the post-Covid era. Some believe that it’s time to re-think the distribution model and to try to give general theatrical releases of docs the same buzz they receive when they show at festivals like RIDM.
The programmers are still in early stages of pulling their 2025 edition together. But the call for entries is open, and Cannes is an opportunity for scouting some first titles.
“This year is not a great year for documentaries in Cannes but there are still some movies I am interested to see,” de Morais observes of the non-fiction titles she has been tracking on the Croisette.
Back home in Canada, relations between RIDM and Hot Docs in Toronto, whose most recent edition has just wrapped, are very cordial. “Lines of communication are very open between film festivals in Canada,” insists Gauthier.
RIDM doesn’t have any formal collaborations with Hot Docs currently but there is a continuous exchange of information. “And we all participate in each other’s markets too,” the Exec Director adds.
Gauthier and his team are always looking to strike alliances. For instance, RIDM has a partnership with Screen Alliance Wales. Forum RIDM, its industry platform, is supporting the development of a creative feature-length documentary project from Wales that can participate in Forum RIDM’s project incubator, scheduled for November 21-26, 2025. There are also close links with events like DocsMX in Mexico and Doclisboa among many others.
In South America, RIDM organised a Quebec focus with Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba International Film Festival in Brazil, and held a Brazilian focus at its own event. The festival will be supporting Canadian talent attending Sheffield DocFest.
“We have been collaborating in terms of programming with other film festivals in order to give a little visibility to the local cinema but also to have other authentic perspectives in our programme…when we want to have a focus on a certain country, I think it is important to have local collaborators so we can have a wider point of view of the local cinema situation,” says De Morais.
“It [working with international partners] has allowed us really to widen our scope [in terms] of the projects that can come in to RIDM. We have collaborated with fantastic organisations in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Cuba. An Egyptian team that came to our Doc Lab won a EURODOC award,” Gauthier emphasises the international vision that underpins RIDM.
