Serge Losique, founder of Montreal World Film Festival, dead at 94

Serge Losique, the cinema professor and impresario who founded the Festival des films du monde and shaped Montreal's cultural identity for half a century, died September 8 at age 94.

Losique was born November 1, 1931, as Srdjan Losic in what was then Yugoslavia. He studied literature in France, first at Toulouse and then at the Sorbonne, where he met and married Mimi Beaudry, who became a lawyer. The couple had three children. In Paris, Losique was a frequent visitor to the Cinémathèque française, where he met Henri Langlois, the coffounder of that institution. He befriended filmmaker giants François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

The Losiques arrived in Quebec in 1957. After obtaining a doctorate in Quebec, Losique became a professor in the French department at Université Sir George Williams, now Concordia University. In 1968, he founded the Conservatoire d'art cinématographique. A significant portion of that collection is now held at the Cinémathèque québécoise.

But Losique's enduring legacy is the Festival canadien des films du monde, which he launched in 1977 as a non-competitive showcase of approximately 180 films. Ingrid Bergman officially opened the inaugural edition, with other international stars in attendance. The festival changed its name to Festival des films du monde and became competitive in 1978, with Alain Delon presiding over the first jury. Over the following two decades, the festival attracted Robert De Niro, Sophia Loren, Isabelle Adjani, and Penélope Cruz.

Losique created a film market within the festival where distributors and producers could meet, making Montreal a nexus of the global film trade. In the 1980s heyday, the FFM was Canada's largest and most glamorous cinematic event, eclipsing the Toronto International Film Festival.

Yet Losique's harsh personality and refusal to cede control damaged the festival's reputation. American distributors eventually preferred Toronto as a glamorous, neutral launch venue for Oscar contenders. European distributors abandoned Montreal. Quebec filmmakers chose to premiere in Toronto instead. The last edition of the FFM took place in 2018.

André Habib, a professor of film studies at Université de Montréal, reflected on Losique's legacy: "He was a difficult, impossible character, but an important figure in cinema who is disappearing today." Little was heard from Losique since the start of the pandemic.