Bertrand Tavernier

Once, many years ago, I had an interview set up for me with a director who had decided, by the time I got there that he didn't want to be interviewed. As I walked into the room, he got up to leave. "You see film," he growled. "Film speak for self." I did. It didn't. That's life, I guess.

Things couldn't have been more different with Bertrand Tavernier and Ça commence aujourd'hui. To start with, I had seen the film by the time I met him and the film not only spoke for self, it grabbed you by the lapels, put its arms round your shoulders and made sure you understood. If any film 'speak for self' more clearly at this year's Berlinale, please tell me so I don't miss it.

Ça commence aujourd'hui is a film that offers a clear, human, passionate voice in the midst of a world going to hell as a result of unemployment, poverty, over-loaded social services and politicians obsessed with economic statistics, budgetary projections and market forces. It's set in France, but I kept hearing the voice of New Labour spouting statistics to prove why everything was OK even though you could see it wasn't.

Scottish actor Peter Mullan told Tavernier the same thing. "I don't speak French, but this a very beautiful film about a school in Glasgow."

Like his film, Tavernier begins talking quietly, speaking slowly, staring off into the distance. Then, as he gets close to the heart of the film - the struggles of the head of an école maternelle in the former mining regions of northern France to get somebody to take responsibility for the appalling conditions in which many of his children's parents live - he becomes increasingly passionate, leaning forward, gesturing with both arms and with such emphasis that the sofa begins to move.

"I met the writer, Dominique Sampiero, who is also a teacher in Northern France, because my daughter [Tiffany Tavernier, co-writer of Ça commence aujourd'hui] fell in love with him," he recalls. "She first got interested in him as a result of reading his poetry, so she wanted to meet him, which she did at a thing called 'La foire aux poétes' in Paris. She was asking his publisher who he was and he was sitting right next to her. So they met, they started to write to each other and she fell in love with him.

"Then, one day, we were spending holidays together, and he started to talk about his work as a teacher. He told me the story of a woman who was coming to fetch her daughter and who collapsed in the playground. And I thought, that's something which I have never seen in a French film.

I had done two films which were violent and tragic and rather dark: Capitaine Conan and L'appât [which won the Golden Bear here in 1994]. And I was looking for a film where the main character would fight for something I would believe in, like in L.627, and like in the documentary which I made and which was shown at the Forum last year called L'autre côté du périph' [Beyond the Tracks]. And so, when Dominique was telling me that story, I felt there were a lot of things which interested me: the fact that the hero, Daniel [brilliantly played by Tavernier regular Philippe Torreton] is somebody who is very ordinary; he is at the bottom of the scale; and he is fighting for some values."

Tavernier's film was shot in a real school in Anzin, near Valenciennes - in Germinal country, a fact celebrated in the poems written by Daniel but disowned by the local politicians, who are anxious to bury the past and develop tourism. All the kids in it, many of the parents and most of the teachers are from Anzin. Only the lead roles are played by professional actors.

Tavernier had worked with kids before, "but never that many and never so young," he admits. "It was much easier than we thought, though, mostly because we worked a lot with them, and we tried to respect them, tried not to be like a bunch of Parisians coming in and stealing images. In all the cités [housing projects], they have a word: 'Respect'. And I think, although they overuse it, it is a very important word."

The film, Tavernier insists, contains no lessons. "That's not my job. It points out things which are not working. And what it does at the end, with the celebration, that band and everything - it says that Daniel will maybe have the courage to fight another year or maybe two. Things can deteriorate again: I don't give false hope. But nor do I want to do a desperate film, because I feel it would be unfair to the people who are fighting so much."

Above all, there is the poetic theme that runs through Ça commence aujourd'hui: Daniel, like Sampiero, writes poetry. "It's something I like to do in my films," says the director, "although I never went so far. I like to break the narrative. It can be shots of landscape; in Une semaine de vacances it is the voices of the children; it can be a song, like in Le juge et l'assassin. I like to have things which break the dramatic construction."

The huge party with which the film ends, though, is both poetic and realistic. "Those celebrations are something which are very important in the North of France: it's one of the places in France where they are still celebrating. I felt suddenly very close to John Ford, because in Ford the celebrations are so important..."

Now there's a mixture for you: Ken Loach and John Ford.