The Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) is to honour 85-year-old Franco-German director Marcel Ophüls (pictured) with a major retrospective and a public discussion at this November’s event.

Ophüls, best known for documentaries including The Sorrow and the Pity, The Troubles We’ve Seen, and his Oscar-winning doc Hotel Terminus, will attend the festival to present his films.

The RIDM retrospective will feature a number of 35mm prints, and will present several titles previously unseen in North America. In addition, the program will also feature two documentaries about Ophüls, including one documenting a meeting between the director and fellow auteur Jean-Luc Godard.

“Ophüls’ body of work, as a documentary director with an appreciation for fiction and a sharp sense of humor, shows him to be not only a patient and persistent seeker of truth, but an inventive filmmaker who shatters genre conventions,” the festival said in a statement.

“With open hostility to the concept of cinema vérité, he unabashedly uses dramatizations and sometimes self-deprecation to make his point. Everywhere an exile, straddling three nationalities and cultures (French, German, American), he works in three countries, looking at each one through the critical eyes of the other two.”

The news comes with Ophüls set to premiere his first major work in 20 years this Friday (May 17), as his new film, Un voyageur, enjoys its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.

The 16th annual RIDM takes place in Montreal, Canada, from November 13-24.