Film

Documentary films can sometimes leave you feeling like a voyeur, outside looking in, and these six selections from the 2016 RIDM all have that quality. The first two, both Canadian productions, are about outsiders themselves: an alienated Quebec anglophone and a Toronto freelance foreign correspondent. The other four all eavesdrop on vulnerable or oblivious people in their frame: potential suicides in Japan, prospective film-school students in France, Holocaust tourists in Germany, young brothers growing up in Norway.

Can you really call yourself a Quebecer if you don't speak French? What if your family has deep roots here? What if you're young and bilingual? Montreal-born filmmaker John Walker set out to explore those questions in his 90-minute film, starting with his own conflicted identity as part of the "anglo exodus" down Highway 401 that began with Quebec's 1980 referendum on sovereignty. Interviewing family, friends and his own researcher, as well as Quebec nationalists like filmmaker Denys Arcand and writer Jacques Godbout, Walker looks at the issues intelligently and lucidly. There's also a sidetrip to Edinburgh for the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence. (Note: There'll be a debate on anglophone identity after the film's second screening, 8 p.m. on Nov. 16 at Concordia University.)

Thirty-nine minutes is all it takes for Montreal-based director Yung Chang to get inside the head of a saver of souls halfway around the world. The man's name is Yukio Shige, he's a retired cop, and in the last decade he's made it his mission to stop people from throwing themselves off the spectacular Tojinbo Cliffs into the Sea of Japan. In a country where there are 70 documented suicides every day, Shige and his team of volunteers quietly go about trying to save desperate students, office workers, elderly couples and drug-addled teens from reaching the point of no return – over 500 so far. The film is also the portrait of a small seaside community: its tour operators, its cafés; its loneliness. There's no obscene visual payoff, no actual suicides captured on camera, just a methodical exploration of humanity.

There's something tedious but also strangely fascinating about watching total strangers invade a public space as tourists. Here, that space is Sachsenhausen, a former Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin. On a summer's day we see the tourists in all their glorious normality: T-shirts and shorts, audio guides and cameras, walking sticks and baby carriages. We also hear them speak to each other and be addressed by their tour guides. Does anyone realize they're being filmed? It's not always obvious. The takes are long and from only a few fixed vantage points, and at 94 minutes the film can exhaust yourpatience. Maybe that's the point: the Holocaust was deadly, but it also had a way of dragging on forever.

The closing film of the RIDM is also one of the festival's most personal, in a political kind of way. With crusading reporters back in vogue (Spotlight, Snowden), Montreal filmmaker Santiago Bertolino risks life and limb to accompany Toronto freelance journalist Jesse Rosenfeld to hotspots in the Middle East and Persian Gulf (Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, northern Iraq). Shot over three years, the film not only sheds light on the conflicts there, it shows the obstacles (including spineless editors) that a freelancer must overcome to gain access to war zones and to get his stories published (in Rosenfeld's case, in TheDailyBeast.com). There's a little too much leftist grandstanding by the film's subject, but the film does get to the heart of what it means to bear witness in the digital age.

I've pretty much had it with talent contests. Especially annoying is seeing young people try to become stars on shows like America's Got Talent. Well, Le concours isn't quite like that; it's a behind-the-scenes look at applicants to France's top film school, La Fémis, and how they have to jump through all sorts of hoops during the selection process. As a primer on what makes a good director, screenwriter, set designer, actor or distributor, Claire Simon's two-hour film does the job, eavesdropping on candidate interviews and the chain-smoking juries' deliberations to see who gets in or shut out, and why. It had me thinking of the Iranian doc Salaam Cinema and its humiliating casting call for would-be actors. Two decades later and a continent away, young ambition – and the arrogance of adults – still grates.

How to edit eight years of family life down to 110 minutes? That's what Norwegian filmmaker Aslaug Holm faced after training her camera on Lukas, her eldest son, and Markus, her youngest, all the way from young childhood to adolescence. The result is intimate, touching and also a little disturbing in its constant exposure of such tender youth. Brothers is a kind of real-life Boyhood without the crushing banality of Richard Linklater's script. Brothers has more in common with one of Quebec's documentary standouts of early 2016, Danae Elon's P.S. Jerusalem, another look at young brothers getting the same mix of constant attention and thoughtful appraisal by a mother constructing a daily diary of their ever-changing lives.

Everyone's in love with young Victoria (Victoria Carmen Sonne). Her fellow film students in Copenhagen adore her, her visiting lecturer from Quebec (director Philippe Lesage himself) wants to sleep with her, even the janitor makes a play for her. She's free to choose, and does. The film is as honest as its characters, and its observations ring just as true. By far the best of the festival, in my opinion, it's a happy mix of the directorial styles and sensibilities of John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer, Woody Allen and the great Nils Malmros.

“Real heroes, they're all dead,” Auschwitz survivor Ruda Roden quipped when I interviewed him and his wife, Eva, back in 2005. Now the Montreal couple are given star treatment in an hour-long documentary by Jo Légaré. She intercuts the couple's unusual love story (wed at Theresienstadt, separated after Birkenau, reunited at Bergen-Belsen), with her own story of young love. Ruda was a psychotherapist into his late 80s, and died at 91, six months before the film’s first airing on the Discovery Channel.

Philippe Lesage took a hard look at his childhood growing up on Montreal's South Shore and came up with this haunting story of fear and trembling in the 1980s, an age of child kidnappings and AIDS. It's all seen through the suspicious eyes of a 10-year-old boy, Félix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier): Are his parents breaking up, will his gym teacher notice the crush he has on her, does his swim coach have a thing for boys? Made after Copenhague: A Love Story but released first, Les démon's success should help sell both.

Come explore the life of German-Jewish philosopher/journalist Hannah Arendt, who made the term “the banality of evil” famous through her coverage of the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. This Israeli-Canadian production by Ada Ushpiz has two edits (2-hour; 1-hour) and two language versions (original English; French overdub). The shorter French one I saw was marred by horizontally stretched archive footage (wrong aspect ratio) and a glaring error in the dub: Martin Heidegger was still alive in 1993 – really?

"Be humble." Sophie Grégoire's whispered advice to her husband, Justin Trudeau, caught on camera at a gala event in this new Quebec doc, is revealing: The man who would be Canada's next prime minister has a bit of an ego problem. The eldest son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau comes across as someone very much imbued with himself, someone who, as the title implies, must even be saved from himself. That's not to say he's a train wreck or loose cannon (choose your metaphor); behind his genial smile and easy way with people, Trudeau is far too measured and calculating to sabotage his rise to head of the federal Liberal Party. Filmmaker duo Guylaine Maroist and Éric Ruel capture the man in all his preening glory, framing their portrait around Trudeau's much-publicized charity boxing match against aboriginal Tory senator Patrick Brazeau in 2012. Even though we know the outcome (Trudeau wins and becomes Liberal chief, Brazeau descends into a spiral of drug and sex assault charges and ostracism from Ottawa), the technique gives the film the drama and grit it needs to rise above an ordinary political biopic. There will be some who won't like to admit liking anything with the name Trudeau on it, but if there were such thing as an Audience Guility Pleasure Award at the RIDM, this movie would win by knockout.

I couldn't help be struck by the contrast between these two biopics. The subjects – a famous director, a struggling actress – are just so emblematic of their zeitgeists. Artists used to ask their audiences to "look at this" – now they want us to "look at me." Robert Altman was a Hollywood iconoclast who cherished his independence, a man who channeled his hard-living personality into a lifetime of great films, from M*A*S*H to Nashville, Short Cuts to Gosford Park. He died at age 81 in 2006, around the same time that Brandy Burre found brief stardom on television, as the political campaign strategist Theresa D'Agostino in the HBO drama series The Wire. These two documentaries – the first a friendly look at Altman, the man and his career, by Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann; the second, a fly-on-the wall portrait of an actress burdened by motherhood, by New York director Robert Greene – illustrate how documentaries can be many different things: informative, evocative, educational, voyeuristic, cruel. But most of all they remind us of where we come from and what we've now become.

Montreal director Kim Nguyen leapt to fame last year when his African child-soldier drama Rebelle (War Witch) was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign-language film. Now he's made something completely different, a documentary about people's sense of smell. It should be more interesting than it is, and part of the reason is simple: It's just too anecdotal. Smell is important – vital, even – for our survival and interaction, and Nguyen introduces us to folks around the world who nose around in the perfume trade, wine, truffles, aromatherapy and such. Their personal stories make us think about how something as seemingly simple as a sniff can be so complex. But isn't it obvious? Don't we already know that smells can be evocative? Anyone who's ever changed a diaper or smelled the scent of freshly mown grass knows a whiff goes a long way.This would be a lot more fun if they'd shot it in Odorama or handed out scratch-and-sniff cards at the door.

Yuri Ancarani wowed audiences at last year's RIDM with his short film Da Vinci, a 25-minute depiction of a live-action medical operation from the inside out, guts and all. It was clinical by definition, and the robotic precision of the camerawork, human drama of the procedure and merciful lack of musical score and narration, were enough to earn Ancarani the fest's prize for best international short film, one of three that the Italian director presented. This year he's back with San Siro, a 26-minute look at the famous soccer stadium in Milan, Italy's largest: the things that go on there, the people who work there, the strange life it leads as a work of monumental art. The build-up to the big match leaves us hanging – there is no actual soccer to watch – but that's the film's power: It makes us aware that architecture has a soul. See if you can sense that next time you go to Saputo Stadium. It might help take the sting out of the Impact losing again.

Much like Roman Polanski did successfully three years ago with the dueling-parents drama Carnage, Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum) has taken a stage play about a battle of wills and made it into a gripping movie, this one based on a true story. André Dussollier (Mélo) stars as Swedish consul Raoul Nordling, who in Nazi-occupied Paris on the night and morning of Aug. 24 and 25, 1944, tries to convince German general Dietrich von Choltitz (Niels Arestrup), not to carry out Hitler's order to dynamite the City of Light before the Allied advance. The two leads are superb, the staging is never stagey (even though the action is mostly kept to one room, with occasional forays outside) and the script (co-written by Schlöndorff and Cyril Gely, adapting his own play) builds tension as it also builds our sympathy for the characters. At 84 minutes, the film is also not too long, and there's a nice twist at the end. If you're a fan of movies about the end of the Second World War like Downfall or I Was Nineteen, or of dueling-duo plays about opposing war ideologies like Copenhagen and A Walk in the Woods, you'll love Diplomatie.

Belgian filmmaker brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne do it again with yet another working-class drama that rings stunningly true. Winner of the ecumenical prize at Cannes and nominated for the Palme d'or (as have most of their pictures since 1999, two of which won), this one stars Marion Cotillard (La vie en rose) as a laid-off factory employee who spends the weekend struggling to get her job back. How? By trying to convince her co-workers to give up their bonus pay so that the company can afford to keep her on. Like Jean Renoir famously said, however, everyone has their reasons, and in this case, half the employees make a good case for why they should turn down the desperate request. Such are their own families' needs, and so strained are their own budgets, that sacrificing for a co-worker becomes not so much a moral decision as a financial one – in fact, both are ineluctably intertwined. Compassion is what the Dardennes are getting at here – people's reasons both to give it and to withhold it – and it's fascinating to watch how people will juggle their own interests when the chips are down for someone else.

Aboriginals are usually only a backdrop in Australian movies; rarely does the plot revolve around them and rarer still are movies that casts native people in the principal roles. In pictures like Ten Canoes and The Tracker, however, writer-director Rolf de Heer has made it a practice to bring aboriginals to the fore in marvellous and illuminating ways. Here, in de Heer's 13th feature, we follow David Gulpilil in the role of Charlie, a gentle old pot smoker on a rural reserve who tries to get back to nature but instead winds up in hospital and then jail after a run-in with the law. Slow -paced but moving stuff. For his performance, Gulpilil, who co-wrote the script, won the best-actor award at Cannes this year in the category Un certain regard.

Disappooiiiiiinted! Everything that made Mondovino such a great little film a decade ago – humour, cunning and especially balance – is missing from Jonathan Nossiter's follow-up about Italian wine, Résistance naturelle. Yes, we know "natural wine" is better than industrial wine, but the filmmaker doesn't help his case by excluding any big producers from having their say. Instead, we get 85 minutes of righteous independents who walk Nossiter around their vineyards and invite him to share their table and lend a sympathetic ear. It's an education; but it's not very entertaining. Bizarrely, the director tries to lighten things up with scenes from old movies screened at the Bologna cinémathèque, but the effort feels unfocused and, ultimately, corked.