While I saw many remarkable titles in competition at this year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF)—one of Asia’s premier documentary festivals, occurring every other year in Taipei—I feel compelled to discuss two non-competition programs: Encounters: The Living Landscape of Contemporary Canadian Documentaries and Taiwan Spectrum: War Memories, Shifting Identities. Together, they reveal something I find admirable about TIDF: its ability to connect people and places in ways that challenge stable notions of identity and community. The Encounters program introduced audiences in Taiwan to ten recent films by Canadian filmmakers centered around relationships to land. It was guest-curated by Marlene Edoyan and Hubert Sabino-Brunette, artistic co-directors at Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal (RIDM). RIDM had previously invited a program of Taiwanese documentaries to their 2025 festival, and in the manner of an exchange program, TIDF returned the gesture. At TIDF, I chatted with Edoyan and filmmaker Pablo Álvarez Mesa, whose film The Soldier’s Lagoon (2024) played in the Encounters program, about our impressions of the festival.