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Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma is facing a monumental crisis, according to co-founder Claude Chamberlan.
The “tyrannical behaviour” of executive director Nicolas Girard Deltruc has created a “toxic work environment” that is “killing the soul of the festival,” Chamberlan lamented on Thursday.
Long hailed as Montreal’s hip, cool and artistically audacious film fest, the FNC has been secretly awash in acrimony, according to Chamberlan, who retired in 2017.
“It’s been six or seven years of fighting,” he said of the event, which enters its 48th edition in October. “The work climate is unbearable. People are suffering. That’s why I’m not there anymore.”
Chamberlan brought up the long battle to unionize by FNC employees, who finally joined the CSN in April, 2018 — an initiative he says was fought in vain and at great expense by Deltruc — as an example of people trying to protect themselves.
He cited the departures of co-director of programming Philippe Gajan, features programmer and programming co-ordinator Sarah El Ouazzani and FNC co-founder Dimitri Eipides, among others, as evidence of a “nightmare” that has been steadily intensifying.
“It has been dragging on,” Chamberlan said of the situation. “They’ve been giving (Deltruc) chances. Nobody dares say anything. They’re scared of losing their jobs, which I understand. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”
Chamberlan spoke of a “culture of intimidation,” a claim supported by one former employee who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.
“I had a very bad experience,” the employee said of their time at the festival. “It was a nightmare that took me two years to get over.”
The employee described repeated verbal attacks from Deltruc, often in the presence of their peers.
“He began criticizing me for things that made no sense, saying I was incompetent and unable to do my job.
“I started to feel terrible. The climate was hostile and toxic. Divide-and-conquer was how he operated.”
The employee also spoke of tirades by Deltruc.
“He lost control a lot. He was verbally aggressive, and yelled at us. It could last three hours. I began to feel really unwell, physically and mentally. The idea of going to the office terrified me. I went into a spiral of depression.”
The employee notified the board of directors of the abuse in 2017, but nothing was done. The employee ended up leaving the FNC, and has spent the time since then recovering from the ordeal.
“It’s been horrible, frankly,” the employee said.
Marie-Hélène Brousseau began working at the FNC in 2012, promoting the professional section FNC PRO and the experimental/digital-focused FNC Lab; she programmed both sections from 2013 to 2015.
“We had a really great team of programmers,” she said. “I met amazing people there, but the work atmosphere was very difficult. It was a bit like a dysfunctional family. You had to shut your mouth; if you contradicted management too directly, there was either anger or reprisals.”
Brousseau spoke of waves of crises, which she said Chamberlan and Gajan tried to mediate; but things always returned to the same sinister status quo.
“I saw people pitted against each other,” she said. “Clans were created. “I don’t want to put it all on Nicolas, but there were always conflicts. I didn’t see any harmonious period at the FNC.”
Annual contract negotiations for the festival’s mostly temporary workers was always complicated and stressful, she explained.
“They always had to be redone and we had to prove and prove again why we should get a bit more money. I think that’s why they unionized, to create some kind of consistency. Otherwise we were at the mercy of the director.”
She described pro-Deltruc and anti-Deltruc camps.
“It made no sense. We spent so much time trying to negotiate our psychological survival.”
Brousseau, who now teaches yoga, said her time at the FNC was “extremely difficult,” adding, “Those were the most anxious years of my life.”
Former co-director of programming Gajan looked set to take over from Chamberlan leading up to his departure, but he says the animosity between Deltruc and the programmers made it impossible for him to stay on.
Deltruc walked out on more than one occasion, according to Gajan; and at one point the entire programming team quit, only to be cajoled back. The crisis peaked in the summer of 2017, at which point Gajan considered leaving. He stayed on to see that year’s festival through.
Things were so bad that the board of directors hired a mediation team.
“The mediation was biased,” Gajan said. “We quickly understood that our words were being repeated to Nicolas. There was no mediation; they were siding with Nicolas.”
The mediation team was headed by film producer Jacques Méthé, former director of Cirque du Soleil Media.
Méthé is now president of the FNC’s board of directors, which includes lawyer Joseph Jarjour (secretary) and accountant Pierre Fauteux (treasurer), and to which were added four women — Caroline Brault, Élaine Hébert, Suzan Kudzman and Myriam Verreault — at the beginning of April.
At the same time Zoé Protat was announced as the festival’s new programming director.
“I like Zoé but … I went to find Sarah (El Ouazzani) and people like that so that I could pass the torch, and there would be continuity,” Gajan said. “Programming is a métier, it’s not just choosing films. You have to know how to accompany films and give them life.”
For Gajan, continuing to work under Deltruc was a deal-breaker.
“The way in which the festival was managed didn’t correspond to the values of the films we were showing, which were very left-leaning, humanist, auteur films,” he said. “What we were living day-to-day was the opposite. It was a form of authoritarianism, where the programming was an accessory to a project nobody understood.”
Vanessa Redgrave attended the 2017 edition of the festival, but didn’t exactly get a royal welcome from Deltruc. When the actress refused to have her picture taken with him, the executive director erupted.
“He began insulting her, screaming at her,” Gajan said. “It went on for three minutes. It was little details like that that made me say, ‘It’s him or me.’ ”
Chamberlan, Gajan, Brousseau and the employee who wished to remain anonymous all describe a hazy and tight-fisted approach to budgets at the festival, in which travel allocations were never clear, and trips to other festivals were increasingly difficult to get approved. All the while, Deltruc would travel freely, sometimes up to four or five months per year.
“You have to travel as a programmer,” Gajan said, “not to see films but to network.”
Gajan, who is the director of Quebec film magazine 24 images, left the FNC in the winter of 2018, after nearly 20 years, and is now earning a degree in horticulture.
“It’s going well,” he said. “Plants are far less petty than humans.”
Andrew Noble, VP of distribution for Montreal distributor Filmoption International, views recent events at the FNC with a philosophical bent.
“Things have shaken up quite a bit in the last year and a half,” he said. “There was a big push to get the union in — half the board quit at that point. A lot of management employees were very upset, and consequently a lot of programmers left. Some were asked to leave, some left voluntarily.
“I think it has resulted in completely new blood, other than Nicolas. He has consolidated his power, if you will. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m still waiting to see. Is the festival all it should be? I definitely think not.”
Montreal is in desperate need of a unifying, generalist film festival, according to Noble. The implosion of Serge Losique’s Festival des films du monde — now on the thinnest of life support — has left a void which the FNC hasn’t managed to fill.
In Noble’s eyes, the festival seeks out too many big films that have already played other festivals, and lacks a clear identity. The departure of key programmers has only exacerbated the problem.
“It’s a real shame that Philippe Gajan is no longer there,” he said. “He had a real sense of theme. You got the sense he was going after something; I don’t know if you have that anymore.”
Without commenting on the internal drama, Noble argued that Deltruc has had some positive influence on the FNC.
“If you think of some of the very hard times, 10 or 15 years ago, he did an amazing job of keeping the festival’s head above water. That’s a good thing, and should be recognized.”
Reached late Thursday afternoon, Deltruc argued that the accusations against him amount to much ado about nothing.
“There is no crisis,” he said. “Changes have been happening since Claude’s retirement, two years ago. There’s no problem. Claude has barely been here for the past five or six years and now he’s saying things without knowing what’s happening.”
He denied verbally attacking employees.
“You would have to ask the people who work at the festival,” he said. “It’s extremely pleasant here. It’s not a prison; if it was, a lot of people would have left over the past 15 years (since my arrival).
“If there really were problems, they would have been identified much earlier. Now suddenly these things are coming out? We’re in transition. It’s always hard to let go of something you invested years in.”
Attendance at the festival was up 12 per cent last year, Deltruc noted. And the board of directors is now more than half women, as is the festival staff.
Chamberlan is not convinced.
“We’ll see,” he said. “A board of directors can be controlled. … I’m not fooled.”
What is required to salvage the festival, in his eyes, is a complete overhaul.
“The solution is pressure,” Chamberlan said. “There needs to be a new board of directors and a new (festival) director who is flexible and consensual.”
Right now, he opined, “the FNC is in nowhere land.”
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