One of the Select Few

I find it difficult to believe that I'm really the first person to ask her the question in the eight or so months since she was appointed head of the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Directors' Fortnight). Marie-Pierre Macia seems to find it hard to believe too. "Bravo!" she says. It was an innocent enough question - one of half-a-dozen prepared in advance: "How does it feel to be the only woman at any of the major film festivals primarily responsible for selection?"

Isn't it ironic, then, that the film Macia has chosen to open her first Quinzaine should be Romain Goupil's A Mort La Mort!, which she describes as "being about the problems of masculinity: about the difficulty of being a man". "Nothing strange about that," says Macia with a grin. "It's a film about masculinity that women are more likely to appreciate than men." The same, though, seems unlikely to be true of the rest of Macia's inaugural line-up, which she had announced to a more than usually packed Quinzaine press conference earlier in the day at the Forum des Images - the fancy new name for the Vidéothèque de Paris - in Les Halles.

French kissing
Quinzaine press conferences are quite different from the Festival ones. There's lots of hugging and kissing, lots of raucous greetings across the auditorium. And they start late. Macia was to have shared the podium with the three presidents of the Société des Réalisateurs de Films, of which the Quinzaine is technically an offshoot: Cédric Klapisch, Nicolas Philibert and Jean-Henri Rogier.

In the end, only Philibert turned up, giving a warm welcome to Macia but a slightly less convincing summary of the importance of the Quinzaine. "It has introduced us to directors like Angelopoulos, Brocka, Loach, Herzog... er, Scorsese... er..."

"Fassbinder!" calls out someone. "Oui, Fass-binder," says Philibert. "Jarmusch!" comes another suggestion. But he gets back on track with a soundbite about what makes the Quinzaine so special: "It's a meeting place for directors," he says, "a place for exchanging ideas."

And that's very much Macia's take on the whole affair. The selection criterion remains (as it was under her predecessor of 30 years, Pierre-Henri Deleau) the "coup de coeur" - that process of falling in love with a film and being as forgiving of its minor faults as we are of those of the people we love.

"I'm fairly sure about my tastes," says Macia, who comes to Cannes by way of the Pacific Film Archive, the San Francisco Film Festival and the Rencontres Internationales du Cinéma, held each year in late October and early November.

Before that she studied classical literature in Paris and worked as a projectionist at the Cinémathèque Française. "They were the best years of my life," she declares frankly. "I learned to love cinema, and I got to know Lilian Gish, George Cukor, King Vidor, Clint Eastwood..." I stop noting the names, assuming this to be part of the process of learning to love cinema, until something she says makes me realise that she got to know these people personally: "They came into the projection box and said hello."

Macia also, incidentally, headed up the Quinzaine's technical team at the old Palais Croisette between 1984 and 1987. But the years since then have largely been spent programming.

"I've been doing this job for 10 years, and I've learned to recognise the important films, even if they have moments of awkwardness or weakness. But, yes, it's a question of the 'coup de coeur'. You can't do this job unless you really care about films. Otherwise..." She makes one of those rudely dismissive noises that are the essence of French cultural conversation - the sort of sound that those who are indeed sure about their tastes rarely think twice about making.

Perhaps it's that certainty which made choosing this year's line-up so difficult. Like her colleagues in the main competition and the Semaine de la Critique, Macia has been surprised and saddened by the limited choice that was available to her in the first four and a half months of 1999. "I saw 200 American films," she says, "and I only picked four. That gives you some idea how bad things were."

Difference of opinion
Macia has backed herself up with a selection committee of two other people - Christine Ravet, formerly with MK2; and Jacques Gerber, who I met earlier in the year, picking - or as it turns out, not picking - Mexican films in Guadalajara. "I need to surround myself with people who think slightly differently," says Macia. "Jacques has a radical approach and a great knowledge of cinema. Christine is someone who is more like me, but who has a network of contacts which complements my own, particularly as far as Asia is concerned."

But Macia has to see and love the film, too. Like Deleau, she is the one who makes the final choice. Unlike Deleau, however, she doesn't believe in fighting running battles with the man in the main Festival office. "The first thing I did when I started was to call Gilles Jacob," she says. "We've met several times, and that is going to be an enormous help to the Quinzaine. I think things are going to be relatively easy this year."

Maybe that's why the Quinzaine poster has buckets and spades on it. Or perhaps it's a visual pun on a phrase much in vogue in 1968, the year the event started: Not 'Sous le pavé, la plage', but 'Sous la plage, le pavé'. Whatever that, in cinematic terms, might mean.