A public letter that was supposed to calm Montreal’s turbulent film festival scene has stirred up yet more trouble.

The letter, signed by the board of directors of the New Montreal FilmFest, offered to merge the troubled startup with one of the city’s other main film events, the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, the week after the latter wrapped on Oct. 23.

But members of NMFF’s board of governors say they were never shown a copy of the Oct. 29 letter, and only learned about it and the merger offer after it was printed in the papers.

Several members of the board of governors have since resigned, among them producers Roger Frappier and Denise Robert and actor Yves Jacques. Citing the letter debacle in their own public letter, they now say the Montreal film festival situation needs reviewing again.

‘It appears obvious to us that Montreal cannot continue to present three festivals of the same kind next year,’ it reads. (Montreal’s third fest is the World Film Festival, headed by Serge Losique.) ‘In our opinion, it is time to return to the drawing board and come up with another formula which will be able to meet the needs of the whole industry and the film enthusiasts.’

‘We needed time to examine what had happened with the NMFF,’ said Robert, the Oscar-winning producer of Les Invasions barbares, in an interview with Playback. ‘We all had a meeting directly after the festival. We requested a post mortem be done – an analysis of the good and bad things that had occurred during the festival. We wanted an independent person to examine what had gone wrong and to suggest alternatives.’

The NMFF was considered a bust, with its post-TIFF calendar placement making it the victim of fest fatigue, leading to poor attendance numbers and a very public battle between programmer Moritz de Hadeln and L’Équipe Spectra organizers.

Robert says the idea for a new festival is not a bad one, but that those involved misjudged what would happen this past fall. ‘The idea that Serge Losique was simply going to go away without a fight and shut down the World Festival – that was an underestimation.’ She also thinks the importance of the FNC was not fully appreciated.

Robert also argues that the offer of a deal with the FNC seems hollow, given that FNC organizers ‘also had to read about it in the papers.’ FNC has not issued any response to the original letter or its proposed merger.

So what are Robert, Frappier and Jacques suggesting? ‘I think it’s very important that we have a committee of people who are dedicated to this industry – producers, directors, writers, journalists – and that they should try to isolate precisely what went wrong and what to do about it,’ says Robert. ‘We should take a year off with the NMFF, for sure. We can’t have three fall festivals again next year.

‘This really has been very bad for Montreal’s reputation abroad. We need to move ahead with reason, not be hotheaded.’