While it's true that over sixty percent of films shown in French cinemas are from the US, investment in film production in France is nearly twice the level of that in the UK, and the number of films made annually is three times as great - though, of course, nowhere near the output of the US. There are ciné-clubs in almost every city, censorship is very slight, students get discounts and foreign films are usually shown in their original language with subtitles (look for version originale or v.o. in the listings). In addition there are a number of film festivals, though the most famous of these, the Cannes Film Festival , where the prized Palme d'Or is handed out, is not, in any public sense, a festival; it's more a screening of what's new for those in the industry. Filmfests where anyone can go along include those at La Rochelle (Rencontres Internationales d'Art Contemporain; June-July); Créteil , in the Paris suburbs (festival of women's films; March/April); La Ciotat (silent films; July); Reims (thrillers; Oct-Nov); Strasbourg (general films; March); and Toulouse (Cinespaña; Oct).

While the French celebrate contemporary cinema they also treasure the old. The Paris Archives du Film possess the largest collection of silent and early talkie movies in the world, and in 1992 they embarked on a fifteen-year, 17-million-franc/2.5-million-euro programme to transfer all the pre-1960 stock onto acetate to avoid disintegration.

Cinema is, of course, a French invention, dating back to 1895 when the Lumière Brothers , marrying photography with the magic lantern show, first projected in Lyon their crackly images in the short Sortie de l'Usine, whose image of a train leaving a factory sent the audience ducking for cover. The medium was eagerly seized by the artists of the post-World War I avant-garde who realized immediately its potential visual impact. Early twentieth-century films such as Jean Cocteau 's Blood of a Poet (1930) and La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1945), Jean Renoir 's Grand Illusion (1937) and Spanish ex-pats Luis Buñuel 's and Salvador Dali 's Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930) were works more of art than entertainment. And after World War II the art-school continued to dominate through directors such as Robert Bresson .

In the "mainstream", as early as 1902 the prolific Georges Meliès had pioneered special effects with his adaptation of Jules Verne's Voyage to the Moon. However, French entertainment cinema didn't truly come into its own until the New Wave movement (Nouvelle Vague) of the 1960s. This raw and gritty style - pioneered by the young assistants of the postwar directors - owed its birth to 1959's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The Four Hundred Blows), by Jean-Claude Truffaut , and Alain Resnais ' Hiroshima Mon Amour of the same year. In the years that followed, French cinema exploded with the morally provocative work of Erich Rohmer , who debuted with 1962's Signe du Lion, and the then-scandalous eroticism of Roger Vadim . Jean-Luc Godard gained a deserved reputation for well-crafted narratives, and his 1960 film Au Bout de Souffle (Breathless) made Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg pin-ups around the world. This was the age in which sexy French stars like Brigitte Bardot , who first appeared on screen bare-breasted in Vadim's Et Dieu Créa la Femme (And God Created Woman) in 1956, came to epitomize glamorous sexuality across the Western world. Among male actors, the suave and self-assured Alain Delon became something of a Sixties French Bogart.

The post-New Wave era of the Seventies, Eighties and early Nineties was dominated by the towering actor Gérard Dépardieu , whose cinema career began in 1965 and whose most memorable roles were in The Return of Martin Guerre (1981), Danton (1983), Jean de Florette (1985) and Camille Claudel (1987). However, it was not until the mid-Eighties that French cinema began to find itself again as a new generation of directors emerged, among them Luc Besson . His Subway (1984) made Christopher Lambert an international star, and was followed by a string of snappy if superficial works like The Big Blue (1995), Nikita (1990) and Léon (1994). He and his contemporaries - Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, 1981; Betty Blue, 1986), Bertrand Tavernier (Mississippi Blues, 1994), Patrice Leconte (Ridicule, 1996) - garnered considerable attention in the English-speaking world.

As the Nineties progressed French film benefited from an international current which saw foreign directors - notably Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa, Andrzej Wajda and the late Krzysztof Kieslowski , director of the Three Colours trilogy - base themselves temporarily or permanently in France, drawn in part by a programme of generous production subsidies. Meanwhile, French production teams began to seek out foreign collaborators in former colonies, such as Algeria, and also as far afield as Russia and Israel. The Algerian cultural connection has led to a spate of co-productions and French-language Algerian works, like Merzak Allouache 's Le Journal de Yasmine (2000), while long-time Russophile Pavel Lounguine (Taxi Blues, 1990; Luna Park, 1992) recently released La Noce (2000).

Contemporary politics and cinematographic innovation made a dramatic comeback in French cinema with the 1996 winner of the French Césars award for best film, La Haine, by Mathieu Kassovitz . A brilliant and strikingly original portrayal of exclusion and racism in the Paris suburbs, La Haine is worlds away from the early Eighties movies that used Paris as a backdrop, such as Diva and Subway. This trend has broadened as young film-makers like Laurent Cantet confront the socio-economic challenges of their own generation, as in his acclaimed Ressources Humaines (2000), and its follow-up L'Emploi du Temps (2001). Another southern French director, Robert Guédiguian , uses hometown Marseille as the backdrop for his gritty proletarian-flavoured works, like Marius et Jeanette (1997) and À la place du coeur (1998).

The 2000 Cannes festival was marked by a return to period dramas, including two seventeenth-century dramas: veteran Roland Joffré 's Vatel, and Patricia Mazuy 's Saint Cyr, both an improvement on the glossy star-vehicle "heritage" movies of the late Nineties, like Beaumarchais L'Insolent (a French equivalent of The Madness of King George) and Le Hussard sur le Toit, which broke budget records and flopped, lapping up funds. Reasonable thrillers have also surfaced in recent years, such as Chantal Akerman 's La Captive (2000), and controversial and censored Baisse-Moi (2000) by Virgine Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi .

Although French cinema has not returned to the world domination of the New Wave period, it is now a healthy and diverse industry. In addition to the film-makers named above, directors to watch out for include Cédric Klapisch whose Chacun Cherche Son Chat (When the Cat's Away) (1996) about day-to-day life in the Bastille area of Paris was followed by Un Air de Famille (1998), a black comedy about a dysfunctional family set in a local bar; and Jacques Dillon , whose poignant Ponette (1996) recounts the tale of a four-year-old girl who refuses to accept the death of her mother.