Two-and-a-half years ago, Hector Babenco was fighting for his life. He won, and now he's made a movie

Brazilian director Hector Babenco is not a person to have a quiet chat with over lunch. As a lover of food and other sensual delights, Babenco is very concerned with what you are eating, and our talk is repeatedly interrupted while he harangues the waiter about the non-appearance of my asparagus.

"C'est un desastre," he finally bellows at the hapless youth. "It's not as if you have to go out and kill some animal. It's just a bunch of vegetables." The asparagus arrives very shortly afterwards.

Babenco also seems to know half the people within hailing distance, including many who come from Argentina, Brazil and other parts of South America, a paradoxical continent that everyone always tells you they're leaving, but from which no one ever really seems to return, metaphorically speaking anyway.

All this, however – the haranguing and the stream of visitors – is great news. Two-and-a-half years ago, the debilitating illness from which Babenco had been suffering was diagnosed as cancer of the lymph glands, and he flew to Seattle for a series of bone-marrow transplants. The good news bit is that they seem to have proved completely successful.

His first film in eight years – which screens on Saturday and is called Coracao iluminado in Portuguese, Brazil's national tongue; Corazon iluminado in Spanish (since much of the film is set in Argentina, where Babenco was born); and Foolish Heart in English – is very much a product of the recovery which has followed those transplants.

"When I started the movie," he says, "I had gone through the transplant and I was extremely fragile physically. The movie played a very important role in the cure. It was almost resurrectional. I think only somebody who has been through this knows what I'm trying to say. You work better, you smoke better, you eat better, you shit better... And the movie played a very important role in that."

It is, he says, indirectly autobiographical, 95% true, 5% lies, "because in every truth there needs to be a piece of lies in order for it to become real". Foolish Heart is set in two time periods, the late sixties and the nineties, in which the same man, Juan – played as a teenager by Walter Quiroz and as a middle-aged man by Miguel Angel Sola – experiences two love affairs. But it's not a nostalgia piece.

"The writer (Ricardo Piglia) and I didn't want it to be a movie looking back with anger or with nostalgia, you know, 'Look how good we were and see what pieces of shit we have become'. That is always what we're told: 'We were so romantic, so pure, we believed in the revolution, we believed in love for all eternity, and suddenly we understood that you have to pay the cheque...'

"The movie doesn't have this approach. It's about memories that are like forgotten and lost pieces of an ancient map. You get some fragment and you try to revisit something. But you don't revisit history as it was: you revisit it as you want to revisit it."

Faced with deciding what he really, really wanted to do with the life that had been given back to him, Babenco never hesitated He wanted to make a movie. This movie And it was a hugely rewarding experience.

"I come from the culture of being blue," he says of his country of birth. "Argentinians are like a poorly defined image of an English person. Being blue and being sad and being melancholic is their goal. To be happy and to have pleasure is seen as not worthy of being experienced. But I ran away from Argentina very early in my life." According to the biographies, he lived in Europe for four years, between the ages of 16 and 20, then settled in Sao Paulo.

"When you reach bottom," he says, reverting to  his illness, "the essentials pop out: there is no room for anything else. I'm the reincarnation of the traditional storytellers in some ways: someone who invents stories to convince people that he's something, or to sell something and get paid for doing it.

"We are in the tradition of the peddlers, making our living out of stories and of inventing ways of saying things. I wanted to live to tell at least one more. And, since it was the last one, I told them I wanted to be the person it was about."

Getting the film into competition at Cannes was the icing on the cake. "Cannes was like Robert Duvall smelling the bombs on the horizon," he says. "When Gilles Jacob accepted the movie, I said, 'OK, what else, can happen?' Two years ago, I was in a hospital in Seattle fighting something, not knowing what it was, but refusing to give up."

"The battle is over now. Medically, there's not a trace of the disease. Knock on wood, of course." He pauses to wallop the table. "I was in Seattle in November and they said, 'Come back in five years!' Pas mal, eh?

"It was the greatest line I ever heard in my life. If I said to you, 'I'll see you in five years', you'd be mad at me. You'd say 'Why not next year? Why not next month?' But, for me, 'Come back in five years' was the best thing that anyone ever said to me."

"So the illness is not something you find difficult to talk about?" I ask, pretty much knowing the answer, since I doubt there is anything Babenco finds it difficult to talk about.

He guffaws. "In life," he says, "there is nothing to hide, nothing to be afraid or ashamed of. I'm just grateful and happy for the clouds and the stars and the friendship and the beer and the cutlery and this tape of yours which is rolling magically without us having any input beyond the fact that you press the button..."