Another life for one time famed Montreal festival?

Once upon a time, this time of year, I would be in Montreal. From 1977 until 2018 the Montreal World Film Festival was a 10-day extravaganza, a late summer smorgasbord of world film. In its early days it rivalled the Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto started in 1976, Montreal in 1977). I remember attending the first edition held at Montreal’s Man and His World (former Expo 67). In the years since it morphed into the city’s downtown core, with unofficial headquarters being the great, late and lamented Le Parisien cinemas (photo), with five cinemas and escalators to different floors – a high rise cinema complex! Other venues were all within a few easy blocks for walking including the grand old Cinéma Impérial, still in existence, and alternately Complex Desjardins, Lowe’s and the Eaton Centre, and the city’s magnificent live arts showcase, Place des Arts. No matter where I lived in Canada, I would make sure to take off several days or an entire week and head to Montreal (I missed four or five years.) I went to the rival Toronto festival twice. And while Toronto overtook in prestige the Montreal festival, those of us who favored Montreal would still snobbishly look down our noses at it – “it’s soooo Hollywood, Montreal is a much more international festival!” Which was true. As well, from a purely logistical viewpoint, the Toronto festival was harder to get around – you sometimes had to take the subway long distances between theatres – and there was the annoying stand-by tickets, if you could get tickets at all for what turned into a human zoo. Montreal by contrast was professionally run using Famous Players and then Cineplex staff and their box office infrastructure. The Montreal fest had a good run - at one time it was actually more popular than Toronto - but increasingly there were news reports that the director, Serge Losique, was playing fast and loose with government and private funding. One by one government agencies pulled out, and critical news stories turned off audiences, attendance continued to drop until Losique’s final send off in 2018. I'd given up by then, last attending in 2016. It was pitiful. Cineplex pulled its venues, among other failings, because Losique had not paid up. So it comes as a surprise to read news stories over the past week in the Montreal press that Losique, who we always joked had nine cinematic lives, is trying to rekindle his beloved festival. This week, for example, he’s showing the greatest hits from the festival’s past. And there's talk of a resurrected permanent festival, now dubbed the Global Montreal Film Festival. Losique, who traces his roots in part to the French New Wave and worked with Jean-Luc Godard, is a diminutive, dishevelled guy who always walked around the festival in a battered baseball cap. We festival goers joked about what a “dictator” he was. It appears at age 91 he might have one or two lives left, the kind of guy who says never says die. We will definitely see.