Hardly a newcomer to Cannes, Jean-Claude Guiguet came to film-making from work as a professional film critic. When he was 30, his short feature Les Belles Manieres (Nice Manners, 1978), was presented in the Directors, Fortnight, followed by an invitation nearly a decade later to present Faubourg Saint-Martin (1986), in the Critics, Week, for which he was awarded the Prix Georges Sadoul. In between directing TV features - The Visitor (1983), The Mirage (1992), and a film with the quaint title L'Amour Est A Reinventer (Love Has Been Invented) he published a cinema chronicle with the provocative title Their Secrets. Les Passagers (The Passengers), brings him back to Cannes for the third time.

The Passengers of the title refers to commuters who get on and off the new tram route in the north of Paris that runs back and forth between Saint-Denis and Bobigny. Each of the passengers has a story to tell - some funny, others poignant, with a twist of the pathetic. Depending on their job or position in life, each person has fashioned his or her own style for living each day as it comes.

All find that there are lessons to be drawn from heartaches and disappointments, from broken promises and the ever-present spectre of death. Jean-Claude Guiguet's forte as a film-maker is that he can handle these experiences in such a sensitive way, nudging the viewer to look a bit more closely at the life going on around them. Ron Holloway