With almost 4,000 journalists to look after during the festival fortnight, the head of Cannes Service de Presse, Christine Aimé, has a busier month of May than most.

"But I'll always listen: we're not infallible. The problem is, it's much easier to say yes than to say no."

"You can't give everyone a top-category press card," she continues. "It's a question of maths. With a theatre like the Debussy, which only has 1,000 seats, if you have 1,200 journalists who want to get in and they all have the right colour card, that means that, by definition, you have 200 unhappy journalists."

It occurs to me that the phrase "unhappy journalist" may well be redundant in Cannes. When was the last time you heard a hack say, "Isn't the organisation great this year? I hardly had to wait to pick up my card and I'm getting straight into screenings without having to queue"? Being head of the Service de Presse must be like playing in goal for a non-league football team: the only time anyone notices you is when you fuck up.

Not surprisingly, Aimé doesn't see things quite that way. But she does concede that the current horde of accredited journalists is about the limit that Cannes can accommodate. "Last year, there were…" - she looks down at a number of neatly ring-bound books on her desk - "3,898. The peak was the 50th anniversary in 1997, when we had" - she flicks back over 20 pages of statistics - "3,929."

The one thing you learn over the years about the Festival Du Film is that they are never short of a statistic. Counting seems to be part of the job - a reaction, no doubt, to the fact that film festivals in general, and Cannes in particular, could have taught the airlines all they now know about over-booking.

Aimé does not share this view. "The number of journalists has stayed pretty stable for the past few years, because there's no way we can go over 4,000," she insists. "For me, there is absolutely no point in increasing the number of journalists because all you would do is increase the numbers of those who aren't happy. The important thing is not just for the press to be present, but also…"

That's as far as she gets: with timing that even I would never have dared to invent, the rest of the sentence is drowned out by a violent burst of pneumatic drilling from the building site for the Riviera, the new Marché building going up right outside the window of Aimé's office on the third floor of the Palais. The drilling stops. She completes the sentence.

"…in the best possible working conditions." She smiles wryly. "You will note," she adds, "that I am not talking about my own working conditions.

"Take the press room. When I got here, there were maybe 30 typewriters and one or two computers. Now, there are digital lines for photographers to send their photos by, there are computers, and internet access. So there has been an enormous technical development."

Other developments of which Aimé is justly proud include the fact that, with films in languages other than French and English, there are now always press screenings with subtitles in both French and English. No longer does one need, as in previous years, to track down elusive rumours of English-subtitled screenings in some malodorous corner of the Star, protected by security men who resemble Vinnie Jones and which always seemed to follow a two-hour slot allocated to a 123-minute film.

Those days are gone, and Christine Aimé is the person we should thank.

Aimé joined the Festival in 1989, after studying economics and political science in Nice, then in Paris. Nice is her home town, a fact which may account for her warm relationship with the Palais security guards. It could even explain their increasingly sunny disposition over the past few years. "Good morning," one of them said to me a couple of days ago, without apparent irony.

She did various jobs, before drifting into a post at TF1 and from there into a part-time job looking after radio and TV journalists with the Festival. ("I never imagined I would be working in the cinema business," she says.) From there, she moved on to become Louisette Fargette's assistant, but found it difficult to build a career around a job which lasted for only five months a year. But when Fargette announced she was retiring, Aimé was invited to take over. In 1991 Fargette and Aimé worked together to make the transition smooth and she is now the only member of the Service De Presse staff to have a 12-month contract. In 1992, Aimé did her first Festival when she was seven months pregnant. "It was hard," she says.

As those of us with kids know, it doesn't get any easier. Her daughter, Marion, is now almost seven, goes to "big school" in Paris, and is looked after by Aimé's parents. "She understands," says Aimé, "that I am just not available to her in May." While to members of the press, of course, Aimé is - another of those things about Cannes that is unfair.