Matthew Wolkow

Matthew Wolkow is a Canadian documentary film director and cinematographer who also collaborates on video installations and performances. Driven by a curiosity for new knowledge, he creates a cinema that reveals the people he meets and the stories that emerge from them. Situated between essay and experimentation, rubbing shoulders with reality, imagination, words, music, and sensorialities, his work benefits from this hybridity, in which form is approached as a resolution.

The subject of retrospectives at the Cinémathèque québécoise, at Chicago Filmmakers, and on the Tënk platform, his films have also been screened at festivals such as IndieLisboa, Camden IFF, Budapest IFF, Punto de Vista, Kasseler Dokfest, and Montreal’s RIDM, as well as institutions including the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Cineteca Nacional de México, the Cineteca do MAM in Rio de Janeiro, and Zumzeig in Barcelona.

In France, his films have been acquired for the catalogues "Images de la culture", managed by the Cinémathèque du documentaire, and "Images en bibliothèque".

He has twice won the Best Work of Art and Experimentation Award at the Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma (in 2018 and 2024). More recently, he completed his first feature-length film, "Eastern Anthems", co-directed with Jean-Jacques Martinod. Distributed by Kino Rebelde and presented at more than twenty festivals worldwide, the film won three awards: Best Film and Best Directors at the Novos Cinemas Festival in Pontevedra, as well as the Pierre-and-Yolande-Perrault Award for Best First Quebec Documentary Feature. It was also theatrically released in Quebec in April 2025 and will soon open in Ecuadorian cinemas.

He has also collaborated on other filmmakers’ projects, notably serving as cinematographer on "Jouvencelles (Bloom)" by Fanie Pelletier (2022), winner of the Best First Feature Award at the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival. He also worked as camera operator and camera assistant on "Cauchemar conseil (Nightmare’s Advice)" by Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia Rousiouk (2026), presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), as well as on several films by Olivier Godin, including the short film "Dracula Sex Tape" (2022), screened at the Berlinale Critics’ Week.