Respect for what she does, to start with. Her first film, Neitoperho (The Collector, 1997), screened in Venice and was Finland's Oscar submission the following year. Her second, Pelon Maantiede (Geography Of Fear), has been screening here in the Forum over the past couple of days (there is one last market screening today).

Then there is respect for how she got where she is. And woe betide anyone who describes her situation as 'privileged', even in a country with a population of five million which still manages to make 12 features a year.

"I spent five years becoming a professional," she says, referring to her stint studying screenwriting and direction at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki, "and before that I was 10 years in the theatre. So I have been working very hard for this. This is not a fucking privilege. This is the result of hard work."

Aretha might not have used all of the same words, but she could scarcely have expressed the sentiment more forcibly.

And finally, there's respect as a theme in her films, both of which she has written herself. Geography Of Fear is possibly the only film in the Festival to have a forensic dentist as its central character: Oili Lyyra (played by Tanjalotta Räikkä), who finds herself involved in investigating a corpse found in Helsinki harbour. The only possible identification is from dental records (hence the forensic dentistry bit). But the deeper Oili gets into the case, the more she comes to realise that this death is not an isolated incident.

influence on her view of respect, which she defines in a very specific way.

"To me," she says, "it means that we all have some kind of private space around us, which ought to be tolerated, ought to be respected. And the fear comes when you realise that the private space you have around you is not being respected, you know?"

Violence is, of course, a theme in Geography Of Fear, as it was in The Collector. But it is not a slasher movie, however much Mantila's definition might apply to a whole range of movies, from Night Of The Living Dead to Scream.

Mantila, however, likes working with genres. "They give you some kind of a form which you can rely on," she says. "They give you a structure which inhibits the viewers but not to the point of making them numb, if you know what I mean. In some sense, it's my ambition to put together a very, very popular genre with a story that really deals with issues that are important to all of us, rather than just with escapism."

What's more, Mantila believes the tide is beginning to turn against popcorn movies ­ at any
rate from Monday to Thursday. Geography Of Fear opened in Finland on 21 January. "During the week, people tend to come and see it," she says. "But during the weekends, they go to see films which are made for mating. And this is not that kind of thing."

"You definitely don't want to hear my predictions," she adds and, before I can even say, "Maybe I do", gives them to me anyway. "I really predict that some kind of political films ­ films which deal with issues that really are important to all of us ­ are going to surface again," she says. "What is Takeshi Kitano doing right now? What is David Lynch doing right now? They have both in a way abandoned violence and are dealing with other issues."

And Geography Of Fear is not a movie about violence, she says. Even more emphatically, it is not a film advocating a kind of vigilante response to whoever it is who refuses to respect your personal space. "Of course," she admits, "violence ­ physical violence ­ is kind of an ultimate form of disrespect. But for myself, I'm a person who always understands everything two days too late! I'm not able to define my space or establish my limits in a situation when it is actually happening. I'd rather either escape or tolerate it.

"And the film is in some sense about people who have grown tired of tolerating or escaping. But it's not really a film about vigilantism, about taking things into your own hands: it's a film about the embarrassment of what could you do ­ about what the fuck should you do ­ when you understand that you can no longer escape, you can no longer tolerate. What's the third option?"

Oh, and something else.