Emanuel Licha’s zo reken and Stefan Pavlovic’s Looking for Horses lead the winners for this year’s Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM). zo reken won two awards including the Grand Prize for Best National Feature. “For his poetic offerings and fertile film technique which, with the complicity of the team, highlight the tension between the characters and the reality that surrounds them,” remarked the jury. “This process reminds us that our existence will always be political.” Licha’s film previously won Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs. The film is a road trip through Haiti shot from within the white sharktooth jeeps that roam the island.
Looking for Horses won the Grand Prize for Best International Feature. The doc is a co-production between the Netherlands, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and France. The RIDM jury praised the for its, “great mastery of a hybrid form, for its eloquent interweaving of formal experimentation into a narrative process, for its poetic interplay between micro and macro-cosmic questions.” Looking for Horses is a first feature that observes as the director and a colleague use the camera to bridge a communication gap through visual language.
Other RIDM winners included Payal Kapadia’s hypnotic A Night of Knowing Nothing, which continued its strong run on the festival circuit by adding a Special Jury Prize. The Canadian Special Jury Prize went to Animal Macula by Sylvain L’Espérance.
Update: RIDM announced on Monday that Jeremiah Hayes’ Dear Audrey won the Audience Award, presented by Made | Nous. Dear Audrey is Hayes’ portrait of filmmaker Martin Duckworth as he cares for his ailing wife. The NFB doc will be released next spring.
The full list of RIDM 2021 winners is as follows:
Grand Prize for Best International Feature, presented by TV5
Looking for Horses by Stefan Pavlovic (Netherlands/Bosnia and Herzegovina/France)
Special Jury Prize – International Feature
A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia (France/India)
Grand Prize for Best National Feature, presented by PRIM
zo reken by Emanuel Licha (Quebec/Canada)
Special Jury Prize – National Feature
Animal Macula by Sylvain L’Espérance (Quebec/Canada)
-Special mention: Dropstones by Caitlin Durlak (Canada).
New Visions Award, presented by the Société civile des auteurs multimédia (SCAM) and Post-Moderne
Far Beyond the Pasturelands by Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis and Maude Plante-Husaruk (Quebec/Canada)
Best International Short or Medium Length Film
If You See Her, Say Hello by Jiajun (Oscar) Zhang and Hee Young Pyun (China)
-Special mention: All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes by Haig Aivazian (Lebanon).
Best National Short or Medium Length Film, presented by Télé-Québec and SLA Location
The Truss Arch by Sonya Stefan (Canada)
Magnus Isacsson Award, presented in collaboration with ARRQ, DOC Québec, Funambules Médias, Cinema Politica and Main Film
Dear Jackie by Henri Pardo (Quebec/Canada)
-Special mention: zo reken by Emanuel Licha (Quebec/Canada).
Student Award, presented by the Caisse Desjardins du Plateau Mont-Royal
zo reken by Emanuel Licha (Quebec/Canada)
Audience Award, presented by Made | Nous
Dear Audrey by Jeremiah Hayes (Canada)
