Montreal: The World Film Festival’s death has been greatly exaggerated, says Serge Losique and his team of festival organizers. That was the clear message sent recently when, in a press release, the WFF brass announced that they had secured their corporate sponsorship for next year.

It may not sound like a shocker, given that Visa and Air Canada, among others, have been sponsoring Montreal’s largest film festival for over a decade. But festival onlookers expected that those corporate sponsors might take a pass on next year’s edition of the WFF, seeing as Telefilm Canada and SODEC now appear poised to pull out of supplying the festival with any funding whatsoever.

This latest salvo was fired by Losique less than a week after he penned another public response to Telefilm and SODEC’s declaration that they were looking for a new Montreal film event to support.

In the letter, published in the Sept. 24 edition of the Montreal Gazette, Losique, along with coauthors WFF chair Pierre Goyette and VP Daniele Cauchard, suggested that Telefilm and SODEC were punishing the WFF for its ‘independence and its defiant criticism of the anti-cultural policies of certain agencies like Telefilm.’

Predictably, the WFF trio slammed last summer’s SECOR report that had criticized the Montreal festival for a lack of transparency and poor management: ‘This sham study is rife with errors, omissions, lame demonstrations and biased conclusions,’ arguing further that the call for applicants to create a new film event is ‘a collection of banalities, contradictions and empty expressions borrowed from the vocabulary of technocrats.’

But perhaps the most serious charge leveled in the rambling letter is the WFF charge that Telefilm and SODEC’s move to support another film event may well be ‘illegal’ and places the two government organizations ‘outside the law.’ The letter refers to the call for applicants as ‘Stalinist’ and ‘an abuse of power,’ suggesting that the model Telefilm and SODEC favor is Toronto’s festival, ‘never mentioning the detrimental effect on cultural diversity of a festival that primarily serves American industry at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.’

The letter followed a similar missive from the WFF that ran in the Sept. 18 Gazette.

Telefilm spokesperson Janine Basile would not comment on Losique’s increasingly nasty war of words, but did say that Telefilm ‘is completely within its mandate’ to seek out new festivals for Montreal. ‘We have been responding to repeated complaints from people in the film industry who feel that the World Film Festival has not done its job.’

The spat continues, with WFF organizers saying they are flat-out refusing to partake in the proposed Telefilm and SODEC application process. Telefilm and SODEC have already made clear that they will not consider funding the WFF unless they received an application by the Oct. 8 deadline.

Meanwhile, the event that many consider the most likely replacement, the Montreal Festival of Nouveau Cinema, launches on Thursday, Oct. 14 and runs for 10 days. Many of the films screening also ran at TIFF, including Clean, Bad Education, and Ryan and Alter Egos, the two National Film Board films inspired by the life of veteran Montreal animator Ryan Larkin.

-www.ffm-montreal.org

-www.nouveaucinema.ca