The 2025 edition of RIDM has come and gone. It featured a diverse selection of films that sparked emotions and captivated us from start to finish.
Days of Wonder, dir. Karin Pennanen
Karin Pennanen embarks on a painstakingly detailed tribute to her late uncle, Markku, through a potpourri of images, poems, letters, and recordings he left before he passed. Taking the definition of collage to the extreme, the Finnish director manages to present the life and work of Markku with commendable tenderness; intermixing his art with her own images, restructuring and reshaping the body of work of Markku while showcasing it, many times, for the first time to an audience. Pennanen not only explores her relationship and closeness with her uncle, but she also reconstructs the later years of his cloistered private life, giving us a bittersweet look into the heart of a person who existed on a different wavelength from all of those around him. Days of Wonder offers a categorically comprehensive look at the life of an artist, of a dreamer, someone who dared to imagine at all costs… and the beautiful imprint he left, perhaps without ever knowing, on Karin.
Morning Circle, dir. Basma Alsharif
Interweaving an incorporeal look at the empty concrete streets of Berlin and a kinetic yet unnerving morning ritual at a kindergarten, Basma Alsharif´s Morning Circle is an effective exploration of the enforced metamorphosis most immigrants are subjected to. The textural approach by Alsharif aptly conveys a sense of universality and subjectivity. The softness of the camera movement is contrasted by the jagged angles of the city and the dynamic movements of the characters at school. Morning Circle excels at the convergence point of its clashing aesthetics, giving both a sense of assertive security and constant danger, a tug-of-war that is also transfixed on the duality of those who are part of a diasporic group, either in Berlin, London, New York, or Montreal.
Tigers Can Be Seen In The Rain, dir. Oscar Ruiz Navia
Oscar Ruiz Navia has proved time and time again his ability to capture the most fleeting moments on screen. His first short film produced in Canada, Tiger Can Be Seen In The Rain, is not the exception. Structured throughout different static frames of a winter in deserted back alleys, Ruiz Navia delves into his grief and the distance between his former home and his new one. Reflecting on loss, the Colombian filmmaker taps into his past in a phenomenological exploration of his physical journey and his journey as an artisan of images.
Chronicle of a City, dir. Nadine Gomez
So many of the intricacies of a city get lost in the humdrum of the quotidian. Nadine Gomez understands this. She finds poetry in the window panes of a skyscraper in Montreal, on the busy sidewalks of Mexico City, on the buzzing lights of nighttime Tokyo. Chronicle of a City is ambitious in its scope as it tries to thread the overarching urban poetry in a global sense. The filmmaker elevates the city symphony into a bigger stage, akin to Chris Marker’s travelogue, and succeeds at finding the beauty in the concrete and the steel. Gomez’s feature is kinetic, magnetic. Chronicle of a City shines as a portrait of the little details that make the world such a fascinating place. Each corner has a multitude of stories and history that thread on each other to create a quilt of experiences and emotions. In short, Nadine Gomez did one of the hardest things to do as a documentarian: she captured humanity.
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