The Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) has announced the films that will open and close the festival’s 18th edition, taking place from November 12 to 22. Les Vaillants by Quebec director Pascal Sanchez will kick off the festivities with its world premiere, while Olmo and the Seagull by Brazilian director Petra Costa and Danish director Lea Glob will bring them to a close. Check out the info on each film below.
Opening Film – Les Vaillants
Les Vaillants brings us into a public housing development in Montreal’s Saint-Michel district. Intended as a counterpoint to the many (un)intentionally reductive reports about the infamous neighbourhood, this new film by Pascal Sanchez is a long-term project, a proud example of a patient, humanist documentary tradition capable of revealing the essence of a place and its people. Filmed over the course of more than a year, Les vaillants is an immersion in a complex community as it copes with the daily challenges encountered by the volunteers and workers in its local associations. Full of funny, touching characters, the film is a lively salute to the people hard at work in the shadows, fighting every day to change lives for the better. This is the second film by Pascal Sanchez to be selected for the RIDM, after La Reine Malade in 2010.
Closing Film – Olmo and the Seagull
The festival will close with the Canadian premiere of Olmo and the Seagull, which had a successful premiere at this year’s Locarno Festival. The film follows Olivia who, for more than ten years, has led an actress’s bohemian life at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, where she met her boyfriend, Serge. Their relationship is now transformed by Olivia’s pregnancy, which prevents her from performing in Chekhov’s The Seagull and forces her to confront her deepest fears. As complex and intense emotions dominate the last six months of her pregnancy, and the couple’s love is put to the test, the two artists turn to a game combining fiction and documentary, sharing their daily lives filled with doubt, worry and joy. The filmmakers, Brazilian director Petra Costa and Danish director Lea Glob, create an inspired hybrid work in which life and imagination are one and the same, fragile and luminous in equal measure. Olmo and the Seagull had its world premiere during this year’s Locarno International Film Festival in the Filmmakers of the Present (Cineasti del presente) competition. The film is a co-production between Brazil, Denmark, France, Portugal and Sweden.
Quebec’s only film festival dedicated to documentaries, the Montreal International Documentary Festival presents the best reality-based films, including the works of established directors and new talents.
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The 18th edition of the RIDM will take place from November 12 to 22, 2015.
For more information visit www.ridm.qc.ca/[email protected]
