Carry on up the Riviera

It looks as if it will be a bumper year for Britain at the Cannes Film Festival, the programme of which was announced this week. Sheila Johnston surveys the line-up and (right) finds out how Pierre-Henri Deleau picks the films for the Directors' Fortnight

If last year was a bust for Britain at the Cannes Film Festival (we had just one movie in competition, The Browning Version, which won nothing), 1995 will be an annus mirabilis. The official selection, announced in Paris on Tuesday, includes no less than seven films (out of a total of 24) with a British element.

They are all, by coincidence, period pieces, but of very different stripes: no one should be bleating on about bland heritage-industry cinema, especially when they include Land and Freedom by Ken Loach, one of Cannes' star auteurs: Raining Stones, his last film there, won the Best Director Award two years ago. The new piece, his most ambitious film to date, is a drama set during the Spanish Civil War and stars Ian Hart, who played John Lennon in last years Backbeat.

A warm review in the American trade magazine Variety this week opined that "despite a slight windiness in its political discussions, [the film's] superb performances, gentle humour, human warmth, action sequences and beautifully teased-out love story should make this one of the must-see art movies of the year." Land and Freedom opened earlier this month in Spain, where it is playing to enthusiastic audiences, but the producers are waiting for the festival before they close distribution deals for the US and Britain.

The Neon Bible, directed by Terence Davies, is set, like his first film Distant Voices Still Lives, during the Second World War and reprises his signature themes - poverty, innocence and its loss, the stranglehold of religion. The location, however, is not Davies' native Liverpool, but the Bible belt of America. Based on a novel by John Kennedy Toole (the author of A Confederacy of Dunces) it stars the wonderful Gena Rowlands, who was the wife and regular leading actress of the late John Cassavetes.

The Best Actress prize (generally a category with few powerful contenders) could well have Emma Thompson's name on it for Carrington, a portrait of the painter Dora Carrington and her relations with the Bloomsbury set, notably the homosexual critic Lytton Strachley (played in the film by Jonathan Pryce). The playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton directs, for the first time.

The Madness of King George needs no introduction. And three more films are not, strictly speaking, British, but have local connections: Angels and Insects is a romantic drama set in Victorian England and based on the novella by AS Byatt. It stars Kristin Scott Thomas, Patsy Kensit and Mark Rylance and is directed by Philip Haas, who made last year's Paul Auster adaptation The Music of Chance. Jefferson in Paris comes from the Merchant-Ivory team while Beyond Rangoon, set during the riots of the Eighties in Burma, is directed by John Boorman. Boorman has another film, Two Nudes Bathing, in the sidebar programme Un Certain Regard.

This section is also screening Christopher Monger's The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain, a comedy set in Wales and starring Hugh Grant. The British entry in the Critics' Week is Madagascar Skin, an offbeat, Lynch-like story with Bernard Hill. It is directed by Chris Newby, whose promising first feature was the black-and-white medieval story Anchoress. The Directors' Fortnight (see interview, right) has one definite British entry, Three Steps to Heaven, a black comedy by a new director, Constantine Giannaris, and starring Katrin Cartlidge (from Mike Leigh's Naked) and another title awaiting confirmation.

The festival opens on 17 May with La Cit des Enfants Perdus, (The City of Lost Children) the eagerly awaited second feature from Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, the team behind Delicatessen, and closes with Sam Raimi's western The Quick and the Dead.

The strong competition line-up (for a complete list see below) also includes new films from leading directors such as Emir Kusturica, the director from the former Yugoslavia who won the Golden Palm exactly 10 years ago for Time of the Gipsies, Theo Angelopoulos, Soueymane Cisse, Hou Hsiao Hsien and Zhang Yimou.

There are three first films and six second films; 14 of the directors have never before appeared in Cannes. Gilles Jacob, the Festival Director, said, introducing his selection: "We want to stress that, after 100 years of film-making, the future of the cinema rests on the shoulders of our young movie-makers."

The American flag is being flown by Tim Burton, with Ed Wood, Jim Jarmusch, with his western Dead Man (both films star Johnny Depp) and Larry Clark. Clark, a first-time director, has already caused a kerfuffle in the States with his movie, Kids, a tough and cynical story of HIV-positive teenagers, which has been given a prohibitive NC-17 censors' rating there: Kids is likely to attract similar controversy on the Croisette.

In four years out of the last six, the Golden Palm has gone to independent American films (they were, in order, sex, lies and videotape, Wild at Heart, Barton Fink and Pulp Fiction) but that prospect looks less likely this year given the composition of the jury: the chairwoman is the French actress Jeanne Moreau and the voters include the British producer Norma Heyman, the Italian director Gianni Amelio and the South African writer Nadine Gordimer - the only American is the maverick John Waters. There is, in short, a fighting chance that Britain might avenge herself for her Oscar defeats when the prizes are shared out on 28 May.