Fall film festival season continues in full swing with the line-up announcements of Montreal’s RIDM and Calgary’s CUFF Docs today. RIDM offers six feature documentaries in the National Competition. They are Les Blues de Bleuet, directed by Andrés Livov; Chronique d’une ville, directed by Nadine Gomez; I Lost Sight of the Landscape, directed by Sophie Bédard-Marcotte; Kindergarten, directed by Jean-François Caissy; Marche Commune, directed by Sylvain L’Espérance; and Partition, directed by Diana Allan. Les Blues de Bleuet screens as RIDM’s closing night selection, announced previously in August.
Six documentaries will also screen as part of the Magnus Isacsson Competition. The series spotlights works that embody the late filmmaker’s spirit of social activism. Screening in the competition are The End of the Internet, directed by Dylan Reibling; Green Valley, directed by Morgan Tams; Les Héritiers, directed by Serge-Olivier Rondeau; Recomposé, directed by Nadia Louis-Desmarchais; Siksikakowan: The Blackfoot Man, directed by Sinakson Trevor Solway; Spare My Bones, Coyote!, directed by Jonah Malak; and True North, directed by Michèle Stephenson.
The New Visions Competition focuses on formally adventurous works from Canada and around the world. Again, six films vie for the prize: Agatha’s Almanac, directed by Amalie Atkins; Days of Wonder, directed by Karin Pennanen; Estados Generales, directed by Mauricio Freyre; In the Manner of Smoke, directed by Armand Yervant Tufenkian; Sirens Call, directed by Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann; Soul of the Foot, directed by Mustafa Uzuner; and Wind, Talk to Me, directed by Stefan Djordjevic. Other docs screening at RIDM include but are not limited to While the Green Grass Grows: A Diary in Seven Parts, which won the National Competition previously when select chapters screened during the film’s earlier stages; along with international docs With Hasan in Gaza, Always, Powwow People, and the opening night double bill of the short doc Memorial Continuum, directed by Malcom Odd, and the feature Letters from Wolf Street, directed by Arjun Talwar.
Over in Calgary, CUFF Docs, the documentary offshoot of the Calgary Underground Film Festival will open with the music doc Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt, directed by Tom Stern. It also screens the Canadian premieres of Tony Benna’s Sundance award winner André Is an Idiot and David Kittredge’s Boorman and the Devil about John Boorman’s ill-fated Exorcist sequel, and Ben Heathcote and Keita Ideno’s Coroner to the Stars about the man who performed autopsies on A-listers like Marilyn Monroe and Natalie Wood. Also screening at the festival is Nicole Bazuin’s portrait of sex worker Andrea Werhun, Modern Whore, and Tamara Kosteva’s environmental fable The Tale of Silyan, which POV called the best documentary at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
CUFF continues the festival run for #skoden, director Damien Eagle Bear’s compelling study of the man whose pain inspired an online meme and efforts to reclaim the narrative. The festival also includes a special screening of CatVideoFest to offer a positive flipside for viral content.
CUFF runs Nov. 19 to 23, while RIDM runs Nov. 20 to 30.
