Tao Gu’s Taming the Horse (pictured) won the best Canadian feature prize at Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), which wrapped its 20th edition on Sunday.

The feature doc, from the Montreal and China-based filmmaker, is produced by Montreal’s GreenGround Productions. It follows a young man from Mongolia who is transplanted to bustling southern China. Another GreenGround-produced feature, In the Waves, from director Jacquelyn Mills, won the prize for the best short or medium-length Canadian film. The 59-minute doc follows Mills’ grandmother as she ponders the meaning of life and her looming death.

The festival’s other Canadian awards went to Jean-François Lesage’s La rivière cachée, which won the special jury prize for a Canadian feature. Lesage is no stranger to RIDM. In 2015, he won best Canadian feature for Un amour d’été. His most recent doc was awarded for “making a natural phenomenon a protagonist, and for the precision and elegance with which the film describes even ordinary existential issues.”  

Meanwhile, the prize for the best new Canadian talent went to Emilie B. Guérette for her doc L’autre Rio. Produced by Montreal’s Colonelle Films, the doc follows families who live in a ruined federal building controlled by drug lords.

The Canadian feature competition jury was composed of Emilie Bujès, Pablo Alvarez Mesa and Robert Gray.

In the other categories, Lebanese filmmaker Anthony Chidiac’s Room for a Man won the grand prize for best international feature, while Syrian director Ziad Kalthoum’s Taste of Cement picked up the special jury prize for an international project.

Elsewhere, the Magnus Isacsson award, which is given to an emerging Canadian director who demonstrates a social conscience in their work, went to Toronto-based Jason O’Hara for State of Exception.

The people’s choice award went to French filmmaker Amandine Gay for the project Ouvrir La Voix.