Producer Denise Robert says she was ‘deeply hurt’ by recent remarks made in a Montreal newspaper in which colleagues, complaining about a lack of funding for Quebec filmmakers, questioned the wisdom of Telefilm Canada putting cash into her two latest projects.

The open letter – printed in the July 5 edition of La Presse and signed by 43 directors, including Robert Lepage, Léa Pool and Denis Villeneuve – saw the talk about a crisis in Quebec film funding turn personal, as it argued against backing commercial movies projects over more artistic ones.

The letter cited Robert’s company, Cinémaginaire, which scored $2.7 million from Telefilm in June for two new features, L’Âge des ténèbres by her collaborator and husband Denys Arcand, and Yves Desgagné’s Roméo et Juliette PQ. That same round of funding turned down projects by Lepage and others.

The letter ran shortly after Robert, an Oscar winner for Les Invasions barbares, and other stakeholders met with Bev Oda, the federal heritage minister, on June 21 in a bid to boost funding to the province. Oda has since turned down their request.

The letter complains in French that Quebec cinema is ‘locked up in a commercial logic which harms quality and diversity,’ and calls for more funding.

‘This is not a time for personal attacks or recriminations,’ says Robert. ‘I don’t know why they would attack a producer. My job is to get money for the creative team, the director, the writer, to make their vision come to life. Why am I being faulted for advocating for the directors I work with?’

She adds that the letter ‘suggests that I took money from one project and gave it to another. This is simply not true. The funding for both projects came separately. When the funding came through for Roméo et Juliette PQ, Denys hadn’t even started writing his screenplay. They were separate cases.’

Pool, one of the co-authors, says the letter was never intended as a personal attack. ‘But the way in which money is currently being handed out is based on past successes, and the way in which success is being defined is very narrow and favors big-budget projects over smaller artistic ones,’ she says.

Pool (The Blue Butterfly) says her most recent project, Pilgrim, based on the Timothy Findley novel of the same name, was turned down twice recently by Telefilm. Lepage (La Face cachée de la lune) was also turned down and has abandoned efforts to bring his La Trilogie des Dragons to the big screen.

Robert produced Pool’s 1994 feature Mouvements du désir and Lepage’s 1995 directorial debut, Le Confessionnal.

On July 12, La Presse published a counter-letter, signed by 39 members of the Quebec film community – including Roger Frappier, François Girard and Nicole Robert – arguing that the crisis is financial, not cultural, and needs a permanent increase in funding.

‘We cannot be sure of the permanence of our success without new funding,’ it reads, adding that 20% of Quebec’s screens are now filled with Quebec content.

Oda turned down the request by Quebec’s filmmaking community for more funding on July 7 – telling producers Denise Robert, Roger Frappier and Marc Daigle in a conference call that any new funding will have to be considered as part of the next federal budget, for 2007/08.

Robert, one of the spokespeople for the 16 Quebec filmmakers who met with Oda last month, said at the time that she was ‘very optimistic’ after that meeting.

Céline Pelletier, spokesperson for the APFTQ, who was also present at the meeting, says, ‘Naturally, we are disappointed. But the answer was, ‘No, for the moment,’ not ‘No forever.” *