MONTREAL — Just when it looked like the acrimony surrounding the World Film Festival was over, an old wound was ripped open when, during the opening-night ceremony last Thursday, fest VP Danièle Cauchard told the crowd that Prime Minister Stephen Harper should ‘kick the behind’ of Telefilm Canada executive director Wayne Clarkson.

This year marks a reversal of fortunes for the WFF, which lost crucial funding from both SODEC and Telefilm two years ago. This year, SODEC announced that it is back on board, kicking in $270,000. Telefilm then provided a reported $100,000 to fund the English and French subtitling of foreign-language films. But that’s less than half of the combined $1 million the two agencies used to provide the WFF.

Cauchard tells Playback Daily she does not regret her remarks. ‘The negotiations with Telefilm have been going on for too long,’ she says. ‘This is nonsense. It’s hard to put on a festival of this size, and Telefilm has been dragging its feet over the issue of funding. SODEC is back. Where is Telefilm?’

Clarkson has responded with humor to the remarks, telling the Globe and Mail that he will bring a pillow with him to his next meeting with the prime minister.

During her opening-night attack, Cauchard also insinuated that Clarkson is defending the Toronto International Film Festival while slighting Montreal’s WFF. The remarks played well with the crowd, who applauded the slight against Clarkson. Clarkson was director of the Toronto festival from 1978 to ’86.

In an official response released on Friday, Telefilm stated, ‘It is regrettable that during the opening of an international event, a festival director would choose to make unfortunate comments; the focus should instead be on celebrating cinema.’

In 2005, Telefilm and SODEC threw their fiscal weight behind an upstart event, the New Montreal FilmFestival, which was supposed to supplant the WFF. But that event was a failure and Montreal’s film fest landscape now looks much as it did prior to 2005.

The WFF runs until Sept. 3