Don't be put off by the title - it's a reference to carrier-pigeons. One of these is Napoleon, the champion carrier raised by Felix, who lives next door to a Walloon family in an industrial area of Belgium.

But that's only part of the story. Les Convoyeurs Attendent (The Carriers Are Waiting), a debut feature in the Directors' Fortnight, is another one of these delightful comédie humaine films - like Toto Le Heros and Antonia's Line - that score at the home box office and also win critical attention abroad.

A family chronicle, the film covers one year in the life of the Walloon family at the dawn of new millennium as seen mostly through eyes of an eight-year-old girl. From her viewpoint, everyday life seems rather absurd. Her father, a reporter for a local newspaper, is always listening to the police band to catch a possible "scoop" - maybe a car accident, a bum dragged off to jail for disturbing the public, or a farmer's crop damaged by a hail storm.

Meanwhile, Dad is training his 15-year-old son to win a car by setting a new record for opening and closing a door 40,000 times in 24 hours. Benoît Mariage comes to film from work in television, where he has specialised in documentaries and reportage on social and political events. His assignments have brought him to Africa on occasion, where he made a remarkable ethnographic film on nomad life in Mauritania and did a TV special on Burkina Faso.

Then, after shooting the short feature Le Signaleur (1997), he developed an ongoing project Les Convoyeurs Attendent into his first feature film with French and Swiss co-production backing. Ron Holloway