Nicolas Girard Deltruc, who had headed the Festival du nouveau cinéma (FNC) for 17 years, was fired last month by his board of directors. Michel Pradier, who worked for a long time at Telefilm Canada, has been appointed interim general director and will be at the head of the next edition of the FNC, which will take place from October 9 to 20, 2024, we learned.
This change in its general management was not made public by the Festival du nouveau cinéma. The name of Nicolas Girard Deltruc, thanked at the beginning of March, still appears on the event’s website. “There is no embezzlement of any kind on the part of anyone,” the president of the FNC board of directors, Jacques Méthé, immediately clarified in an interview.
It was Girard Deltruc’s closed-door management style that led to his dismissal, according to the board of directors. Girard Deltruc had been general director of the FNC since 2007, when his co-founder Claude Chamberlan was still its artistic director.
“The Festival is more than 50 years old,” recalls Jacques Méthé. It was led by one of its founders for decades and had continued, for all sorts of reasons, somewhat on the same model: the Festival above all of one person, who is the sole master. The board of directors came to the conclusion that we should not continue like this. We need to find a more modern way of operating, in which there is a harmonious relationship between the operations team, on the one hand, and the board of directors, on the other. »
A new general director will not be appointed before the next edition of the Festival du nouveau cinéma. No potential candidate has yet been approached or even considered, underlines Jacques Méthé. However, a process has been initiated to redefine the festival’s governance model within a year, drawing inspiration from festival structures of the same scale in the country and around the world.
This decision by the board of directors, made up of six voting members and one non-voting member, had been looming for some time. “Knowing that it would be difficult and that it would mean more work for a board made up of volunteers,” adds Jacques Méthé, specifying that the FNC is a non-profit organization. “Volunteers looking for more work are generally quite rare! »
We must change the deeply rooted corporate culture of the FNC, however, believes Jacques Méthé, president of the board of directors since 2018 and former president of the media division of Cirque du Soleil.
“It’s a culture in which it’s difficult to have discussions,” he says. There were no discussions for 50 years. We have to do things differently. »
Autonomy and user-friendliness
The dismissal of Nicolas Girard Deltruc, who did not respond to our interview request, is the latest twist in the recent soap opera at the FNC and the Montreal film festivals. Claude Chamberlan, who founded the FNC in 1971 with Dimitri Eipides, left his artistic direction with a bang, accusing Nicolas Girard Deltruc in the spring of 2019 of maintaining a “tyrannical attitude” towards his team (which the main person concerned denied) . Chamberlan had not been more tender at the time towards Jacques Méthé.
“Perhaps we can change this style which functions a bit like a religion, for a style which functions more like an organization,” believes Méthé. Because God has ascended to heaven and now we are all just poor mortals making it all work! »
Michel Pradier, specialized in cinema administration and financing, wishes to reassure employees, programmers and collaborators, who remain in place, as well as the cinema-loving public: he will do everything to ensure that the next Festival du nouveau cinéma does not suffer from this major change, advocating autonomy and conviviality.
The fact remains that for a team, losing its captain seven months before the end of an event like the FNC is not an easy matter. Preparing a film festival takes time, canvassing, contacts…
Michel Pradier will be present at the Cannes Film Festival in mid-May to ensure the visibility of the FNC abroad. The interim general director hopes for the future that the Festival du nouveau cinéma can “join a rather major league of festivals around the world”. “There is a place to take, I think we must take it and we have everything we need to take it,” he said.
“If we have an administrative structure that is harmonious, and if we are well anchored in our cinematographic environment, it will be all the easier to attract people internationally,” adds Pradier, who gives the example of The Montreal Symphony Orchestra which, thanks to its reputation, manages to attract the greatest conductors, whether from Quebec or abroad.
Before tackling the task of appointing a successor to Nicolas Girard Deltruc, the board of directors of the Festival du nouveau cinéma hired a consultant specializing in human resources in order to examine what can be improved in its organization. There is work to be done, it seems…