Losique launched the festival in part as a response to the inaugural
1976 Festival of Festivals, as he reportedly believed that Montreal was a more appropriate location than Toronto to be the host of a prestige film festival. After screening an inaugural program in summer 1977, he pursued the FIAPF accreditation, which was secured in early 1978. The 1978 event, however, saw the first instance of Losique using his position to take a public swipe at the Toronto festival, when he sent four films that had been booked to appear at both festivals back to their distributors instead of forwarding the prints to Toronto as directed. As early as 1980, the festival was marketing itself as one that was focused more on the films than their stars, with Losique regularly trumpeting that motto through the years as the thing that made his festival better than Toronto's. By 1985, Losique was already beginning to attract criticism for running the festival in an "authoritarian" and "
Napoleonic" manner, with programming driven disproportionately by his own personal taste in film rather than consideration for what would appeal to the general public. Through the 1980s, the Montreal and Toronto film festivals were typically seen as different but complementary events, although Losique continued to lash out at any media suggestion that the events were comparable in prestige or quality, and his most consistent public relations strategy in this era was to release public statements criticizing TIFF's public relations statements for being insufficiently deferential to his festival's superiority. even within Montreal, its prominence was being increasingly challenged by the
Festival du nouveau cinéma, which although older than the MWFF had previously been much smaller until gaining momentum in the early 1990s. In 1991, for the first time, newspapers in Montreal began running front-page stories calling for Losique to step down and hand over leadership of the festival to a successor due to poor programming decisions and declining attendance. In 1998, the festival faced heavy criticism when it opted to present a lifetime achievement award to
Sandra Bullock, despite her still having been known only for a few hit films over the past couple of years at that point, rather than the sort of sustained career typically required to earn lifetime achievement honours. This was perceived as undermining Losique's longtime assertion that his event was film-driven instead of star-driven while TIFF was the other way around. The WFF lost the sponsorship of its previous government cultural funders,
SODEC and
Telefilm Canada as a result of disagreements with Losique in 2004, after Losique refused to cooperate with a review by those agencies of Canada's major film festivals. Subsequently, these two funding agencies announced that they would support a new international film festival, called the
New Montreal FilmFest (FIFM), to be managed by Spectra Entertainment and headed by
Daniel Langlois. Despite the competing festival and the loss of government funding, however, Losique continued to organize the World Film Festival, and filed lawsuits against both Telefilm and Spectra, further suing
Moritz de Hadeln personally after he was announced as FIFM's artistic director. as of July 2007, Losique's lawsuits were dropped, paving the way for a restoration of government funding. In 2005, Losique first announced and later withdrew the film
Karla from the festival after the principal sponsor of the festival,
Air Canada, threatened to withdraw its sponsorship of the festival if that film were included. The film — about
Karla Homolka, a young woman who was convicted of manslaughter and who served twelve years in prison for her part in the kidnapping, sex enslavement, rapes and murders of teenage girls, including her own sister, in a case said to involve
ephebophilia — was controversial in Canada, with many calling for its boycott throughout the country. In 2015 a group of employees claimed they were not paid. In 2016 many of the employees resigned, citing poor leadership and financial uncertainty amongst other issues. In an interview with CTV News,
Montreal Gazette entertainment columnist Bill Brownstein referred to Losique as having a "Napoleonic complex" and not "playing well with the other children" resulting in government and sponsors withdrawing their funding support. In the same year
Cineplex Entertainment withdrew its support from the festival, causing it to lose the Forum Theatre as a venue. Left with only the Imperial Cinema for a venue, the festival had to cancel some of its planned screenings and proceed with a reduced lineup, although several of the city's independent theatres stepped in to help screen films at the last minute. In 2017, power was cut at the Imperial Theatre in July, just a few weeks before the festival, due to unpaid electricity bills, with that year's festival being saved by a last-minute intervention by
Pierre-Karl Péladeau and
Québecor. In 2018 the festival was accused by
Revenu Québec of owing almost $500,000 in unpaid taxes, but the festival was allowed to proceed that year after Losique made an initial payment of $33,000. By this time, Brendan Kelly of the
Montreal Gazette was explicitly calling for the festival to be shut down, writing that "Way back in the early days of the festival in the late '70s and early '80s, the FFM was a happening event that could be said to be seriously rival the Toronto fest, then called the Festival of Festivals. But that hasn't been true for 30 years, and it's almost entirely Losique's fault. As long as the FFM exists, it drags down the city's film scene. Agencies and producers in other countries who don't realize Losique's fest is irrelevant send films and filmmakers, and the poor auteurs turn up to discover they're screening films in front of near-empty rooms. It also causes enormous problems for the other much more relevant film festivals in our city, notably the Festival du nouveau cinéma and
Fantasia. These festivals have not been given the chance to step up and become the city's première festival with Losique's event staggering from edition to edition." In 2019, the WFF announced that it was cancelling the 43rd edition of the event. however, with the
COVID-19 pandemic emerging over the winter, the festival's return in 2020 was not possible, and the festival subsequently failed to see a revival in 2021. Robert Everett-Green of
The Globe and Mail noted that while an event like TIFF, with its strong programming team, could easily work around the health difficulties of a single programmer, the stated reason for the MWFF's cancellation effectively confirmed the longstanding charges that Losique ran the festival as a personal fiefdom rather than cultivating a team. In 2022, Losique announced plans to revive the festival as the Global Montreal Film Festival, with a 2022 edition featuring free screenings of a selection of films that had previously screened at FFM, leading to a full revival of the festival in 2023. The free screening series in 2022 attracted only a few dozen people; filmmaker
André Forcier, whose 1994 film
The Wind from Wyoming (Le Vent du Wyoming) was one of the titles being screened, criticized the event as having been poorly advertised. The 2023 revival did not materialize, and there has been no subsequent news about the festival's return. ==Festival==