True, the Quinzaine's accommodation has a certain elegance. The organisation is very much a child of May '68 and the offices have about them the white-space minimalism in which late sixties people thought they ought to live. That has since been augmented by some distinctly post-modern tat, including a collection of moulded plastic Jackie Brown figurines lurking on the mantelpiece (I'm only guessing Jackie Brown: the De Niro doll could well be Pavarotti). 

Off to one side on a bookshelf sit two huge box-files marked 'Refusals. United States. 1998'. France gets a single box-file, the rest of the world another. There is something defiantly anti-hegemonic about this proportion. 'Hegemony' is one of Quinzaine boss Pierre-Henri DeleauÕs favourite words. 

I have time to reflect on all of this because Deleau is late back from lunch and effusively apologetic about the fact, both at the outset and at the end, coming out into the hallway specially to apologise one more time as I leave. Maybe I should have told him that, in years gone by, I have sat for far longer outside the boss' office at two of the three major film festivals waiting for a promised interview that didn't happen and wasn't apologised for. 

And anyway, the people at the Quinzaine are so (I'm sure they'd hate the namby-pamby English word) nice, the time passes quickly. "He's been out to lunch," grins a very young assistant, temporarily occupying Deleau's desk. "He'll be completely blotto." 

I can't imagine anyone thinking, let alone saying, that about Gilles Jacob. And anyway, Pierre-Henri Deleau is not remotely blotto. He is what he always is: laconic, eloquent, to the point and quietly angry. In contrast to the Festival's grandiloquent event, the Quinzaine's press conference earlier that day had been wry and succinct: a quick summary of the position vis-a-vis the Festival ("You have to tell it like it is" is another favourite Deleau phrase) and a passionate evocation of some of the films.only some: Deleau refuses simply to list the ones he doesn't single out. And, while Jacob is happy to reveal the size of the pool from which the selection has been fished, Deleau clearly regards such statistical stuff as trivia. Pressed, he reveals the answer: between 700 and 750 films. There are 353 days between each festival. Work it out. 

The quiet anger that is never far from the surface comes from a sense that, although the details may have changed in the 30 years since the Quinzaine was set up (following, of course, the seismic events of May 1968), the basics have not. "We're still the poor relation at Cannes," he says. "We only exist because of aid from the Ministry of Culture and the CNC - which is the same thing - and because it is in the nature of French directors that they would go to war if anything happened to us. If - and you have to tell it like it is - it was up to the Festival, we'd long since have been swept away. With the Festival de Cannes, it's the same as with a form of economic hegemonism that is becoming more and more powerful and that wants everything to be a monopoly." 

"You have to know how far you can go," he continues. "One year, in the Old Palais, we had an illuminated facade which everyone raved about [1983, if memory serves]. Well, we weren't allowed to have that again. If we get new sponsors, the Festival will absorb them the following year. And the cards need to be redistributed, technically speaking. Otherwise, we'll be like the Critics' Week, which is in the process of dying, now it's been thrown out of the Palais." 

It would surprise most festivaliers to learn that there is no contact between the Festival and the Quinzaine, despite their having existed side-by-side for three decades. "I haven't met, I haven't even seen Gilles Jacob for, what...? four, five years? I think the last time I met him was when I was on the jury in Venice, which must have been five years ago. No, there's no contact: none at all." 

Anyone tempted to dismiss such a stance as stemming from that occupational hazard of all organisations, institutional whinging, underestimates the almost missionary zeal from which the resentment stems: a determination that the Cannes public should get to see the year's best movies in a film-friendly context, regardless of format, budget, censorship, politics or commercial considerations. 

Zeal is not too strong a word: a loosely phrased question about how the Quinzaine chooses its line-up each year is treated to a shrug and a one-sentence answer. "It's simple: we only take the ones we love." A more cautious query about whether the selection criteria have changed in the 30 years he has been in the job - longer, incidentally, than any comparable selector anywhere in the world - fares little better." 

No, they haven't," says Deleau flatly. "And anyway, it's not a question of 'criteria': it's more a matter of following your heart." Hearts being rather singular things, Deleau himself always has the final word. "Someone has to. You have to be able to see the whole picture. It's like painting: Gauguin and Van Gogh were friends, but I can't see Van Gogh going round to Gauguin's and saying 'Should I do it in green or blue?'