Of all the French entries in this year's Cannes Film Festival, Bruno Dumont's L'Humanité (Humanity) is the most eagerly awaited. Scheduled strategically in the middle of the festival, it's very position hints at its promise for award consideration or a potential for media controversy - or maybe both. Not only a poised and talented director, Dumont is also one whose visionary statements and reserved artistic style confirm his status as a unique auteur on the French and European film scene.

Born 1958 in Lille, Dumont graduated with a master's degree in philosophy before turning to cinema as his chosen profession. He took his time learning the film trade from the bottom up, making 40 short films, documentaries and advertising films before directing his first feature, La Vie De Jesus (1996), programmed in the Directors' Fortnight at the 1997 Cannes Festival. It was an auspicious debut to say the least. Among the armful of awards collected that year by The Life Of Jesus were: Special Mention for the Camera d'Or, Prix Jean Vigo; Best Actor Award (to David Douche) at Taormina; Prix du Tournage at Avignon; FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at Chicago; Palmera d'Oro at Valence; International Critics Award at Sao Paulo; Sutherland Trophy for Best Feature Film at London; Fassbinder Award, Best First Film at Alexandria; Prix Arsenals at Riga; and Discovery of the Year Citation at the European Film Awards.

Not bad for a film set in the industrial northeast of France, in which non-professional actors from the area interpret the mute lives of youths on motorbikes whose everyday routine begins and ends with boredom. One scene in particular sets Dumont apart from other realist-cinema proponents and would-be imitators of Robert Bresson: the moment when the epileptic protagonist (called Jesus, no less) has sex with his working-class girlfriend in broad daylight in an open field. Far from being offensive or scandalous, this rather low-key, human and compassionate scene alleviates and counter-balances much of the evil and violence that follows.

umont takes this idea one step further in his tragedy Humanity, describing it as "a film about sex and death. It is definitely a minor metaphysical work because of its distance from reality, one that goes directly to primal causes - in other words, the body. These are, I believe, the metaphysics of morals, of the origins of behaviour, of instinct. It sounds them out." As for the shots of genitalia in the film, Dumont is unapologetic: "I'm not afraid of this sort of cruelty on the screen; this necessary and brief obscenity inserting itself in the gentleness of people and their faces."

Pharaon, a single police detective around 30 years of age, is at heart a gentle person with a sense of duty, even if he can be driven to tears when brought face to face with the miseries of his job. He lives with his mother in Bailleul, a provincial hamlet in which nothing really goes unseen because everyone knows everybody. The street on which he lives bears the name of his grandfather, Pharaon de Winter (1849-1924), a local artist and portrait-painter, who belonged to the realist school and painted religious scenes or subjects closest to him in order to better understand humanity. In one sequence Pharaon visits an exhibition of his grand-father's religious paintings dating from the 1880s.