Each movie was to be shot on location in two or three days, using the same crew. After a tough editing process . . . during which two of the movies were dropped . . . the movie premiered at Cannes last May to acclaim.

By bringing together such a melange of different perspectives, it offers a much richer portrait of Paris than the similar New York Stories, which didn't come near to offering a full dose of New York. Vincenzo Natali, who directs Elijah Wood as the unsuspecting backpacker victim of a vampiress on a bridge in the Madeleine, relished the challenge of having to respond creatively to a given location. "I'm very much into fantasy, " he tells me. "For that reason I love going to a real place because it always grounds the fantasy. With any fantasy, you need to feel a sense of reality, even if it's outlandish."

Everyone will have their favourites pieces.

Alexander Payne achieves a beautiful epiphany with a lonely American tourist speaking in voiceover in comically wretched French about being in Paris. Wes Craven shows Oscar Wilde re-appearing beside his grave at Pere Lachaise to interrupt squabbling lovers. The Coen brothers dump Steve Buscemi on a Metro platform where he becomes totally confused. Tom Twyker speeds up a romance between a blind man and a American played by Natalie Portman.

"I did it for the fun, for a chance to be in the company of so many talented people."

says Richard LaGravanese, who brings together Fanny Ardant and Bob Hoskins in a sex shop as they try to reignite their passion for each other. LaGravanese, a screenwriter currently filming Cecelia Ahern's bestseller PS I Love You, got the idea on a vist to Pigalle a year before. "I was walking around and I saw the sex shops, " he tells me. "So I went in. A man took me to a room, put me inside and closed the door.

Suddenly a woman entered, much older than I expected, and I was terrified. She started to take off her bra. I said, 'No, do you speak English? Well if I give you 50 can I ask you a couple of questions.' She told me sometimes couples came to have her watch them have sex. And that began the idea."

Why did he chose Hoskins and Ardant? "I think Bob is very sexy, I like the visual of the bulldog Bob and the elegant Fanny."

Perhaps Paris, je t'aime is best experienced . . . as Vincenzo Natali suggests . . . "as you would a record album. Seeing it the first time certain ones stand out, but if you play it several times you find others you like maybe more." Hopefully it will be back for a longer run after the festival, which opens this Tuesday with The Singer (Quand J'etais Chanteur), a film that evokes much of what is endearing about the French in a different way. Gerard Depardieu is an ageing local club singer . . . a Gallic Daniel O'Donnell . . . who spots a beautiful blonde in the audience one night. She's wary of being let down, he's spent a life-time avoiding commitment.

Both are lonely and tentatively begin a relationship. The repertoire of songs . . . all popular in France . . . create an ambience that gives a gentle poignancy. When it was screened at Cannes, nobody left until the credits, played out to a full song, were over.

The Singer and Paris, je t'aime provide perfect bookends for a wide-ranging programme that includes Ton Gatlif 's Transylvania, starring Asia Argento as a pregnant French woman who has come to Romania in search of her lover, a Romany musician who, she claims, was deported. A centrepiece is Jean-Jacques Beineix's (for its time) daringly erotic doomed love story, Betty Blue.