Scottish director Lynne Ramsay discusses Ratcatcher, which is a lot more than a gritty portrait of slum-dwellers in Glasgow.

There are easier things in life than trying to conduct a conversation with a voluble Scottish film-maker over a hearing-impaired telephone while all the while a cheerful French tele- communications engineer keeps asking you to move your feet so he can install a new line for the Hungarian-born Australian journalist at the next desk. Who said this wasn't an international business?

You might like to add that Lynne Ramsay - the Scottish film-maker in question and director of today's Un Certain Regard movie, Ratcatcher - may live in London these days, but her accent has never left Glasgow. Or should that be that Glasgow has never left her accent?

Plus, she speaks very fast, which comes as something of a surprise given the slow, wistful, frequently wordless nature of Ratcatcher - a film which, despite its title, is anything but a gritty portrait of wasted lives in some dilapidated slum. Well, it's that, too. But the point lies elsewhere.

"It's definitely not social realism," says Ramsay. "It's not another grim film from up north, but it's not just some piece of fantasy, either: there's another level as well. I guess you could call it poetic."

I guess you could. Ramsay herself wrote the script some two-and-half years ago, at the start of a meteorically successful career on the short films circuit which has seen her pick up three Jury prizes: at Cannes in 1996 for Small Deaths; at Clermont Ferrand in 1997 for Kill the Day; and at Cannes in 1998 for Gasman.

The titles, you have to admit, don't promise unremitting jollity. Neither does Ratcatcher in terms of its story, which starts and ends with the death of a child. But the beauty of the film is both undeniable and difficult to describe. Which, one supposes, is why she made it as a film, not told it as a story.

"I'd just finished my very first short film," says Ramsay of the project's origins, "and I started looking around for what would appeal to me. The story was kind of organic: it just started happening. Then I did some research into what was going on in Glasgow during the refuse-workers strike in 1973. That provided the backdrop for the boy's story - the fact that everything was breaking down around him."

The boy in question is 12-year-old James Gillespie (played by 12-year-old Glasgow newcomer William Eadie), who lives in a crumbling tenement on the outskirts of Glasgow. You could call his family dysfunctional, except that an out-of-work father who drinks too much and a mother whom pressure is turning toward bitterness is the norm in James' world. An accident in a nearby canal in which another boy drowns further alienates James, and his only point of emotional contact with the world increasingly becomes 14-year-old Margaret Anne, who has problems of her own.

Then, one day, riding a Glasgow Transport bus to the end of the line, James finds an unfinished housing development on the edge of a cornfield - the place in which he dreams (and once even believed) his family will be rehoused.

"It's his journey to another place, a new home, a place of solace," says Ramsay in the film's press notes. "He is alienated in his own environment, where he sees his own bleak future written in the faces of the people who surround him. He fantasises of belonging in a beautiful place that is very pure and clean, a place he feels he doesn't deserve, due to his guilt over his own actions."

What James gets is the canal, a filthy, putrid stretch of water of the kind that criss-cross Glasgow but which, when push came to shove, Ramsay and her production designer, Jane Morton (who worked on all three of Ramsay's shorts), couldn't come up with in real life. "Jane is great, but she couldn't find one that we could use anywhere. We just couldn't find a clean enough canal," chuckles Ramsay. "In a short film, you can sort of busk about. But, with a feature, it's different."

So, in the end, they built their own canal, severely straining Ratcatcher's £1.8-million budget, digging out 5,000 tonnes of earth, lining the trench with PVC, pumping in 220,000 gallons of water and praying the PVC held.

Commissioned by Andrea Calderwood at BBC Scotland, Ratcatcher followed the producer when she moved to Pathé last year, where it was enthusiastically embraced as part of the company's expanding production policy.

In the end, the refuse-strike background - which provides the film with a memorable scene in which the inhabitants of the tenement briefly discover unity against the troops who have been sent in to clear the rubbish - became less important. "It was more important to start with," concedes Ramsay, "but the film is about the boy, and I really didn't want to make it a political thing. It could even have been set in the present, I suppose."

The film was shot in the summer of 1998. But, come Wednesday, Ramsay was still holed up in London ironing out final problems with the opticals. "The guy who does them is on holiday in Spain, which is a bit of a problem," she says.

You can see why she would be worried: after all, the look of the film is crucial. "I try to create the emotion through the image," she explains. "It's partly a question of the framing and partly a question of what happens in the frame. When you're that close to people, it's not the easiest thing in the world, but I sort of have an idea in my head about how I want it to be."

And that, believe me, comes across, with or without the bits the guy currently supping sangria in Spain may or may not have added by the time you get to see it.