Media entrepreneur Daniel Langlois is joining forces with the film festival he led and then left a year and half ago.

Langlois left Montreal's Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) to join a rival festival. Now, his company Ex-Centris is forgiving the FNC's long-term debt of $500,000 and entering into a 10-year partnership. That collaboration will see future editions of the festival at the Ex-Centris cinema complex, said an agreement earlier this week.

The festival, celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, was thought to be in trouble in February 2005 when Langlois and executive director Sheila de la Varende stepped down for positions at the New Montreal FilmFest. The rival festival booked its 2005 dates to run at the same time as the FNC.

But the New Montreal FilmFest, which competed with the Festival du Nouveau Cinema and Serge Losique's 29-year-old World Film Festival, lasted only one year before folding.

“Considering the 2005 experience, we want to avoid at all costs that Montreal once again projects an incoherent image on the international scene with several concurrent festivals,” Spectra head Alain Simard said when the FilmFest closed.

With the new partnership, Langlois returns to his role as one of the FNC's main financial backers. Before 2005 he gave more than $1.5 million of his private money to the organization.

It also marks a return of the festival, which runs from Oct. 18 to 28 this year, to the Ex-Centris cinema complex after a one-year absence. The festival also will also show at the Cinéma Impérial, Cinéma Parallèle, Cinémathèque québécoise and the Just For Laughs Museum.

The deal also launches the Daniel Langlois Award for Innovation, to be presented annually, and the launch of a year-round education program and summer camp for children.

The FNC thanked Langlois and Ex-Centris for their "generous contribution and commitment to a visionary partnership" in a press release.

"We hope to take full advantage of this opportunity as the foundation of our activities aimed at developing our audiences, giving them the very best that cinema has to offer," said Festival director Bruno Jobin.