A program built across places and methods
RIDM announced its 29th documentary festival lineup on October 28: 127 films from 54 countries for November 19–29. The program places To Hold a Mountain, about a family in Montenegro, beside Once Upon a Time in Harlem, built from a 1972 gathering of artists. Their methods are as different as their settings.
That range gives viewers a better way into the program than trying to treat 127 titles as one subject. Documentaries do not merely differ by topic. They differ in where the camera stands, who can speak, what survives in an archive and how much time a filmmaker gives a person to reveal a life. A festival lineup can make those choices visible by placing works with unlike methods in the same conversation. RIDM's selection suggests that the present and the past are both active questions: one film watches a community defend its landscape now, while another asks what an earlier generation left on film. Each has to decide what a record can preserve and what it cannot.
To Hold a Mountain begins with daily work
The opening film is Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić's To Hold a Mountain. RIDM's film record follows Mileva “Gara” Jovanivic and her daughter Nada through a summer of herding in Montenegro's Dinaric Alps, where plans for a NATO training ground threaten their pasture. It also describes family wounds that surface alongside the struggle over land. The film won the World Cinema Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year.
The premise gives the mountain more than a scenic role. Grazing animals, repeated labor and a mother-daughter routine show what a place makes possible before a proposed use of that place threatens it. The public dispute is therefore tied to work and care the audience can understand through individuals. That is where observational cinema has an advantage over a quick argument assembled from positions: it can let a viewer notice why the same patch of ground carries history, income and belonging at once. Family pain complicates the picture further. A landscape can be worth defending without being a simple refuge, and a shared cause does not erase a difficult past. The film's opening-night position asks the festival audience to begin with those overlapping pressures rather than with a neatly resolved environmental slogan.
An archive becomes a conversation
Another selection, Once Upon a Time in Harlem, begins with footage William Greaves arranged at Duke Ellington's home in 1972. Figures of the Harlem Renaissance met there, and his son David Greaves was among the crew. David later completed the film using those conversations and material that shows the filming itself. RIDM lists the work in its Panorama section; the new lineup also includes a substantial group of local premieres.
Here the act of preservation is part of the story. A recorded conversation can return voices that a later audience may know mainly through books, photographs or reputations. Showing the conditions of the shoot reminds us that even a seemingly spontaneous gathering has a camera, an invitation list and an editor. That does not weaken the testimony; it gives the viewer a more honest sense of how cultural memory reaches the screen. Set beside To Hold a Mountain, the Greaves film shows two distinct documentary urgencies. One records a way of life while its future is disputed. The other works with a surviving record to let an earlier artistic community speak again. RIDM's newly published lineup is strongest when it makes room for both kinds of attention, and for the many local filmmakers who can connect these questions to the festival's own city. The difference also lies in the time each film handles. On the mountain, each day belongs to a conflict still unfolding; in the Greaves film, an afternoon in 1972 is edited and reconsidered decades later. Both forms give people room to speak for themselves, but their images carry memory in very different ways. That tension is a reason to see the works in the same program.