Serge Losique

Serge Losique was a Québécois writer, film professor, festival organizer, director and scriptwriter who spent half a century arguing that Montreal deserved a window onto world cinema. Born Srdjan Losic on 1 November 1931 in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he remade himself in France and then in Quebec as Serge Losique, the black-capped, combative figure who founded the Montreal World Film Festival (Festival des films du monde, or FFM) in 1977 and steered it for more than four decades.

He studied literature in the 1950s at the University of Toulouse and at the Sorbonne in Paris. Alongside his seminars he haunted the Cinémathèque française, crossing paths with Henri Langlois and with filmmakers who would soon be called the French New Wave, among them François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. In Paris he also met Mimi Beaudry, later an immigration lawyer, whom he married and with whom he had three children. In 1965 he published a doctoral study, L'idéal humain de Saint-Exupéry, with A.G. Nizet under the spelling Serge Losic.

Losique settled in Montreal in 1957. He taught French and cinema at Collège de Montréal and then at Sir George Williams University, which merged into Concordia University in 1974. Colleagues later credited him with helping to establish some of the first credit film courses in North America. In 1968, while directing Concordia's French department, he founded the Conservatory of Cinematographic Art. He persuaded Langlois to lecture there when Langlois's own position in Paris was under pressure during the so-called Langlois affair. After Langlois died in 1977, Losique invited Godard to continue public sessions that fed into Godard's later Histoire(s) du cinéma project. In 1969 he launched the Canadian Student Film Festival, later folded into the FFM. The Conservatory showed hundreds of films a year until video and DVD distribution made the model harder to sustain; it wound down around 1998. Parts of its collection later reached the Cinémathèque québécoise.

The FFM opened in August 1977 as the Canadian World Film Festival, a non-competitive showcase of roughly 180 titles. Ingrid Bergman helped inaugurate the first edition; Gloria Swanson, Howard Hawks and Fay Wray appeared; Werner Herzog's Stroszek and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses sat in the selection. In 1978 the event shortened its public name to Festival des films du monde, turned competitive, and placed Alain Delon at the head of its jury. For years it was the only competitive North American festival recognized by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF). Stars and jurors who passed through Montreal included Sophia Loren, Isabelle Adjani, Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Penélope Cruz, Catherine Deneuve, Gong Li and others. Losique also cultivated a film market inside the festival, briefly making Montreal a meeting place for distributors hunting world cinema.

His temperament was as famous as his programming. Admirers called him a lantern-lighter for cinephiles; critics called him stubborn, opaque and autocratic. From the 1990s onward, comparisons with the Toronto International Film Festival sharpened as Hollywood and European distributors preferred Toronto's Oscar-season launchpad. A 2004 Secor report for Telefilm and SODEC criticized the FFM's transparency and hospitality. Public funders pulled support around 2005, floated a rival Montreal festival that collapsed after one edition, then partially returned. Sponsors fled by 2014. SODEC sued over an unpaid loan near 900,000 Canadian dollars. In 2016, ahead of the 40th anniversary, staff resigned over working conditions. Quebecor took over the Imperial cinema. Revenu Québec pursued hundreds of thousands in unpaid amounts. Losique pledged personal assets, including a Potton farm where he had raised sheep. In July 2019 the FFM announced a pause to prepare 2020; the pause became permanent, and no digital edition appeared during the pandemic.

Losique also wrote fiction and essays (De Z à A; Le Québec et sa littérature), scripted the 1970 film No More Words, appeared in documentaries about Langlois and Pierre Rissient, and shot a Silk Road documentary series in China. He kept private life tightly guarded. Survivors include children Jacques Beaudry-Losique, François Beaudry-Losique and Anne-Marie Losique, a well-known Quebec producer and host, and grandchildren Patrick, Éric and Jinju.

He died on 8 September 2026 at Granby Hospital after several weeks of hospitalization, aged 94. Family statements asked for privacy. Tributes from Premier Christine Fréchette's office, filmmaker Denis Côté and cinema professors framed him as a difficult, essential Montreal cinema figure: the man who once made the city feel like a capital of world film, and who refused to surrender that ambition even as the festival that bore his imprint faded.