RIDM 2025: Chronicle of a City | Interview with Nadine Gomez

In Chronicle of a City, presented in its Canadian premiere at the 28th edition of the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), filmmaker Nadine Gomez offers an urban wandering through three cities, aesthetically woven together into a kind of “composite city,” sparking a multitude of reflections on the relationship between contemporary humans and the urban space.

“I feel that by looking closely at the city, we understand things about ourselves as a society, as a time, as individuals within a collective, but also as political and philosophical beings,” Gomez explains. Marked by an enduring fascination with the urban world since her studies, she describes this profound interest as “a kind of lens through which I read the world I live in and belong to.”

“We are the city”

She clarifies the object of her obsession: “The city isn’t an object separate from us — we are the city. It shapes us, cradles us, suffocates us… It’s an intimate experience that is hard to define.”

This enduring obsession feeds her filmmaking practice, including her two previous features, THE HORSE PALACE (2012) and EXARCHEIA, The Chanting of Birds (2018). “There is this idea of metabolizing a reflection that, for me, originally has an academic foundation.” While she explores urban material in literature, cinema pushes her to work on its representation. “I’m working with this idea of finding cinema within the urban concept.”

She adds: “My pleasure in observing the city is constant and infinite. […] There are invisible elements, more complex ones, things you simply feel. So how do you make an audience feel something in a film? That’s what turned it into a method.”

An urban voyage shaped by dreamlike textures across three cities

Conceived as an “urban voyage shaped by dreamlike textures,” Chronicle of a City proposes a reflective and sensorial journey through Montreal, Tokyo, and Mexico City. It is a voyage the filmmaker invites us into, offering different meditations on our relationship with the urban world.

“In the film, there’s the idea that cities increasingly resemble one another. We are more connected to each other as urban dwellers than we are to our own rural regions. There’s homogenization, globalization, but also the idea that cities are intimate — they belong to our stories, our bodies, our histories, our fears. And we often talk about them through theorists or experts. I wanted to bring it back to intimacy.”

Alongside these reflections, the film explores the city’s geographic and sociological strata: “There is the spectacle city, the transit city, the food city, the nocturnal city. The city in altitude, the underground city.” The filmmaker reflects on this vast project: “Bringing all this together is a long journey.”

A research-creation project

Gomez undertakes what she calls a process of “research-creation,” drawing from the real fabric of the three filmed cities the material that will serve the ideas she seeks to explore. This approach — far removed from character-driven documentaries — requires her to search within reality for elements that can take part in the reflective path she wishes to construct, itself inspired by her own lived experience of the city.

“That is to say, I was thinking through more conceptual things, larger ideas, and then trying to use the real world to translate them, to serve those ideas,” she explains.

The film therefore required a number of formal experiments in the field, as well as exploration in the edit, to find “the intuitions and sensations that answer the theory.”

What strikes most is the fluidity of the film’s succession of scenes, gleaned here and there, and the consistency in the camera’s relationship to the urban material — whether in North America or Asia.

Human bodies within urban structures

Among the film’s tableaux, two shots stand out, separated by a few dozen minutes yet both quietly impressionistic studies of the body in the city — a theme the film handles with particular grace. One shot observes a South American cleaning attendant surrendering to the water in a rooftop pool atop a luxurious Montreal skyscraper. The other shows a Japanese artist on a bridge, leaning gracefully backward, as if tilting toward a backdrop split by two fast-moving lanes of dense traffic.

Gomez reveals her particular interest in “the idea of the body in the city.” She elaborates: “The physical relationship of a contemporary subject to an urban space is something that has interested me for a long time, and it isn’t something that’s easy to explain. It’s theoretical, but in a documentary film, how do you make people feel it?”

These shots are so evocative because the filmmaker was deeply preoccupied with the question of how to represent the city. “How to film a city is a question I am constantly asking myself,” she says.

One rule quickly emerged: “We absolutely wanted to avoid clichés.” It proved a stimulating artistic constraint: “It was about trying to find another language, to find a universe that was dreamlike, that peeled away from what we always see, from the images that saturate our minds. […] It was really an exercise, I think — a challenge — to find my own way of telling the city.”

The film’s opening shot, perched atop a dizzying crane and following the operator at work, came to her naturally: “I wanted to open the film with construction workers because they’re the ones who build it.” The character we follow for a few moments reveals a breathtaking panorama of downtown Montreal from the top of his crane, where time seems to flow differently. “He is our bird; he embodies an aerial point of view,” Gomez notes.

To support the film’s dreamlike and reflective approach, sound plays an essential role. “From the start, there was the idea that the sound treatment should be non-realistic.” The goal was “to support scenes that shift us away from reality.” She adds: “The music was created alongside the edit, and it was already part of the narrative structure’s game.”

As for cinematic references, Gomez shares: “All the great urban symphonies have always spoken to me.” She mentions Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which she discovered in university, as well as Michael Glawogger’s Megacities (1998) : “an extraordinary film from which I think I unconsciously drew inspiration,” she confides. “I reproduced a bit of his way of having characters speak through slightly unusual stagings, and it’s also a very mysterious film.” The inherent movement of Chronicle of a City also echoes Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) and Waking Life (2001): “I’m fond of those kinds of tableaux that carry a philosophical dimension, where you know you’re moving from one character to another within that flow.”

A renewed connection with Mexico

Born in Quebec to a Mexican father, Chronicle of a City also allowed Gomez to film for the first time in her father’s city. Having lived in Mexico for short stretches, she delights in the experience: “It feels like, through my projects, I triggered a new connection with Mexico myself.” The film allowed her to satisfy a long-held “desire to reconnect with Mexico City in a different way.”

Fittingly, the film had its world premiere in late October as the opening film of the 20th edition of DocsMX. “It was a huge, deeply emotional moment to present the film there. Because I exist in Mexico for my family, but this was like having a dialogue — an encounter — with the documentary film community. It was very beautiful.”

The prolific Montreal artist plans to continue nurturing this newly revitalized connection with Mexico while pursuing her exploration of the urban fabric. Her next project, already approaching production, is a documentary fiction set in Cancun and told from the perspective of a character, conceived as the existential quest of a young girl.

The 28th edition of Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) is running on November 20-30, 2025 in Montreal, Canada.