The Montreal International Documentary Festival ran from November 21 to 30, 2025, showcasing over 100 films, both made in Canada and abroad. The festival also included a variety of talks, performances, and events for documentary fans and filmmakers to connect and share their love of non-fiction cinema.
Six Taiwanese filmmakers came together on November 23 in one particularly insightful panel discussion, “Navigating Taiwanese Cinema”, to consider the unique landscape of documentary filmmaking in Taiwan. They mulled over what it meant to be making films in a context where non-fiction filmmaking was only truly able to develop after the lifting of martial law in 1987.
While many of the panelists’ films handled political questions more directly, such as Wei-Lin Hung’s documentary, K’s Room, which tells the story of a famous Taiwanese English teacher and political prisoner, director Yi- Shan Lo discussed an alternative approach. In her film, After the Snowmelt, in which a young woman returns to the Himalayans to process her grief for a friend who has passed away, the personal comes first.
“For me, it’s an intentional choice not to include the political problems of Taiwan. Me and my friend, we met each other at a protest, maybe 10 years ago when we were high school students […], so actually the story’s background is very political in terms of the Taiwan-China relationship, and yet I didn’t include this background in the story,” Lo said during the panel.
She hopes, though, that the political context might permeate the film anyway, somehow reaching the viewer in their experience of watching the film.
“Through telling the story very personally, I believe that somehow at the end, the historical background will ultimately come out,” Lo added.
Nadia Louis-Desmarchais also found herself navigating the personal-political divide over the course of her seven-year project to document the experiences of biracial women in Quebec. While she initially intended to make the film entirely in the third-person, using sit-down interviews with other women about their experiences, she realized over the course of the project that her own story was also at the heart of her drive to make the film.
“It was through meeting those women that I realized that even if we didn’t grow up together, we all had lived through the same things,” Louis-Desmarchais said during a Q&A after the screening of her film, Recomposée.
By chance, it was returning to her father’s collection of childhood photographs and home videos that sparked the idea to weave her own story into the film.
“Since it was a film that came together over many years, eventually, I looked in my family’s house, with my father and all the tapes he had filmed. The tapes were all still there, in the house, in a very dusty library,” Louis-Desmarchais explained. “And there I found, really, the explanation for who I was. You know, when you see yourself as a child, it’s like seeing the real version of yourself. And it revealed a lot to me, and that was, ultimately, the way in which I began to think about adding my own presence to the film through these images from my past.”
As it turns out, audiences resonated with Louis-Desmarchais’ blend of the personal and the political—the film won both the People’s Choice Award and the Student Jury Award, as well as gaining a special mention in the running for the Magnus-Isacsson Award for socially-conscious filmmaking.
Several films about Palestine also earned awards at the festival, including one from McGill’s own professor of anthropology, Diana Allan. Allan’s film, Partition, combines little-before-seen footage of the British occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1948 with audio recordings of Palestinian songs and stories. This film, too, weaves the personal in with the political, in moments of direct address from the audio recordings. It was screened by McGill’s Critical Media Lab on January 14.
In the short film category, Momentum, which uses footage shot by the filmmaker’s father during the Second Intifada, won the Special Jury Prize. Nada El-Omari’s film is composed solely of these hand-held video recordings, on top of which she paints and writes her own perspectives. Throughout the film, she wonders what pushed her father to record these moments — why these people? On screen, there are moments of violence, but also scenes of dancing and children playing.
As a representative from the Special Jury summed up, “[We award this prize] to a film that weaves together the intimate and the political, for a daughter revisiting images shot by her father twenty years ago, for time that repeats itself in a loop, a camera that mimics what our spirit could grasp in moments of uprising, and sound that mimics the experience of living under the military occupation of Palestine.”
Over the course of just 19 minutes, El-Omari explores not just the history of the Second Intifada, but also her relationship to her father, and what these images reveal about his experience.
While the festival included films from across the world, it ended with a closing film from much closer to home: Andrés Livov’s quiet, beautiful treatment of the Lac-Saint-Jean blueberry industry in his film Les blues du bleuet. From interviews with migrant workers who live in blueberry camps to sweeping shots of industrial harvesting machines and back down again to elderly inhabitants who now pick blueberries for pies, but remember their childhoods of picking by hand to support their families, the film offers a gently kaleidoscopic picture of Quebec’s famous berry.
Fittingly, for such a soft-spoken movie, Livov opened his speech with a simple statement: “I’m terrified,” which he repeated a second time, louder, at the audience’s request. Despite his hesitancy when it comes to public speaking, Livov obviously has a gift for prompting people to open up on camera, and an ear for poignant stories or remarks. Although the blueberries are the focus of the film, there are also deep windows into the lives of people who have been touched, one way or another, by the blueberry industry — several of whom were present in the room for the screening.
The closing film continued a pattern that was present throughout the festival: directors, editors, cinematographers, and interview subjects were often present in the room, excited to take part in what was often the first screening of their films. Often, when directors thanked participants in their speeches, those same participants stood up in the audience, greeted by thunderous applause from all around them. This intimacy and engagement was truly fitting for a festival where so many of the film — even the ones that dealt with intractable international issues — were clearly so personal to their directors, and where so many of the films blurred the line between filmmaker and subject, or even participant and audience.