There are certain things one should never do while angry, such as drive a car, drink, enlist in the army, or write open letters to city newspapers. This is doubly true if one happens to be the head of a film festival that is caught up in a battle for public and professional opinion with its financial backers.

And yet Serge Losique and his colleagues at the Montreal World Film Festival have exploded – not once, but twice in one week, across the pages of the Montreal Gazette – howling with all the rhetorical clarity of the Incredible Hulk against Telefilm Canada and SODEC, which are threatening to pull their support from the Montreal fest, following complaints and a damning report about its general mismanagement (see story, p. 2).

There is a lot of name calling and a lot of two-dollar words in both letters. Losique and his cosignatories liken the federal and Quebec provincial agencies, and the research firm they have hired, to ‘technocrats,’ Stalinists, blackmailers and ‘putschist apparatchiks.’ He charges that the culturally diverse WFF is being intentionally edged out to make more room for the Hollywood-driven Toronto International Film Festival. He blusters, rambles and stomps his feet, and in the end threatens legal action, piecing together a not-entirely clear case that Telefilm and SODEC are breaking the law by trying to redirect their cash.

It is very easy to make fun of the WFF letters. They’re an excellent example of how not to win an argument and should be made available as such to high school debating teams, barstool politicians and anyone who keeps a blog.

But they also represent a more grievous blunder. If we take Losique at his word that the cultural welfare of Montreal and, by extension, Quebec, are high on his list of concerns, it’s hard to imagine how anyone even halfway familiar with this country’s political and cultural history could allow themselves to act so carelessly.

There are already a good many people in this country who – quite unfairly I must stress – already associate the topic of Quebec’s cultural well-being with bitter rhetoric and Byzantine legal proceedings, and they will not be won over by more of the same. Playing the ‘Toronto vs. Montreal’ card may win some points in WFF’s backyard but it does not play as well with Telefilm’s masters in Ottawa.

The Montreal festival has always defined itself as the culturally vibrant alternative to Toronto. This is a fair if somewhat unevenly proven point. But if Losique wishes to dress his battle with his backers as a fight for something approaching cultural sovereignty, then he owes it to Quebec, its people and its institutions to act with the skill and intelligence that the issue deserves.