Montreal World Film Festival (8/26-9/6/04).

There were several potent movies on view during the Montreal World Film Festival's 28th edition, but they played out in the shadow of an intense real-life drama. Just before the festival opened, Telefilm Canada and Quebec funding agency SODEC released a report chastizing MWFF for numerous sins. The litany of alleged offences included bad management, poor relations with the industry and the media, and ticket sales that are not high enough for a city the size of Montreal. When the show was over, the agencies invited proposals for a new international film event. MWFF president Serge Losique and his V.P., Daniele Cauchard, scoffed at these moves and refused to play along. The duo insisted that the 2005 edition will go ahead even if they are cut loose from Telefilm and SODEC funding.

After saying nothing about the public scolding, Losique "showed his teeth," as one daily put it, in mid-September. He hauled a lawsuit-threatening lawyer into the picture and fired off open letters that pushed every possible button. According to the missives, which deployed an arsenal of World War Two and Cold War invectives, the 28-year-old MWFF was being assaulted by "apparatchiks" and "putschists" at two levels of government. Signed by Losique, Cauchard and MWFF chairman Pierre Goyette, the letters unleashed blistering critiques of their own. For instance, they charged that SECOR, the consulting firm that issued the report, had a bias against MWFF. Not only was the study full of distortions, claimed festival brass, it set a precedent endangering other government-aided events. The funding agencies, claimed Losique, were behaving like "the Soviet Union during the era of Andrei Jdanov and the Stalinist 'social realism' that controlled all creative activity."

There was a lot more, far too much to detail here. Suffice to say that Telefilm responded to the charges with a Web page and SECOR defended itself. Meanwhile, supporters of the festival, including veteran producer Rock Demers, wrote an angry letter to Canadian Heritage and Quebec's Culture and Communications ministry, and the Gazette published a pro-MWFF editorial. To further complicate matters, major sponsors such as Air Canada and VISA announced they were on board for the 2005 edition. As I write this, the game of chicken is in maximum overdrive. On their October 8 deadline, the agencies received four propositions for a new event. The contenders for the approximately $1 million in government money were: Le Festival du Nouveau Cinema; Groupe Rozon, the organizers of Montreal's Just for Laughs Comedy Festival; the post-production operation Vision Globale, which sponsors the FanTasia genre film festival; and a group of 15 major industry professionals who would be guided by L'Equipe Spectra, organizers of the city's hugely successful jazz festival. The latter proposition imagined Losique remaining but under the supervision of an active board. Naturally, Losique refused to buy into the proposal, and at one point, L'Equipe Spectra's president, Alain Simard, apparently denied that he had made one.

As for Le Festival du Nouveau Cinema, its president, Daniel Langlois, first said he would not make a proposal and then submitted one. A press release indicated that Langlois, the software entrepreneur who built the high-tech culture palace Ex-Centris, will play this one out carefully, one step at a time. If Le Festival du Nouveau Cinema receives the Telefilm and SODEC money, allowing his event to actualize its "vision for growth," Langlois and his new executive director, Sheila de La Varende, will present its "final development plan" in March, 2005.

At the end of October, the story took another twist. On Friday, October 29, the much-anticipated day of decision, Telefilm and SODEC announced that the proposals were excellent but they needed another month of tweaking before the agencies could reach a decision. Moreover, Telefilm chairperson Charles Belanger stated unequivocally that there would be no backing off. Losique's festival would not get the money. Meanwhile, the L'Equipe Spectra contingent confirmed it was in the running but had reportedly dropped the idea of Losique remaining in charge. In another development, Just for Laughs and FanTasia said they would fuse their ideas into a festival that would highlight the genre pictures FanTasia programs and the comedies Just for Laughs screens in Comedia, its annual film event.

As the convoluted story wore on, Quebec's film milieu developed a case of the heebie-jeebies. Even some diehard critics of Losique and his team flipped from shaudenfreude to dread that a horribly embarrassing mess loomed on the horizon. If Telefilm, SODEC and MWFF collide (after all, Losique is free to plunge ahead with MWFF, competing on every level with the new festival, as well as go to court), the splat will be heard loud and clear on the international film scene. By mid-October, Odile Tremblay, Le Devoirs senior film critic, was calling the situation a "Grand Guignol spectacle" and a "circus."

As for this year's MWFF, it played 416 movies from 72 countries. The festival's guest list included French acting legend Isabelle Adjani and Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulous, who were in town for tributes and special prizes. Spanish beauty Penelope Cruz also showed up in support of two films, Sergio Castellito's Non Ti Muovere and John Duigan's Head in the Clouds. The latter gets its energy from Charlize Theron's performance as a spectacularly gorgeous bohemian in 1920s and 1930s Paris and had its world premiere at MWFF. The festival had a pretty good year in 2004, but will it return in its present form? As I write, the only certainty is that Losique will not go gently into the good night. Director of communications and veteran publicist David Novek, who returned in 2004 to head the press office that he ran from 1977 to 1991, has no doubt that "Losique is a fighter. He's announced that the festival is going ahead next year and he's not going to let anybody push him around."