Whatever happened to the rest of the planet?

There was a time when TV and cinema listings were awash with foreign-language films. Now there's a plan to bring them back. Geoffrey Macnab reports

Young Israeli film-maker Nir Bergman's Broken Wings has screened at more than 40 festivals worldwide, picking up awards everywhere from Tokyo to Berlin. Set in Haifa, it's a slow-burning but beautifully crafted tale of a middle-class Israeli family torn apart by grief. The father has died in a freak accident (a bee sting after a trip to the beach) and his wife and children simply can't cope in his absence.

This is not a flashily directed, youth-oriented movie; the director is not well known, and there are no obvious marketing hooks. But what distinguishes Bergman's feature debut is the quality of its writing and performances. A generation ago, Broken Wings would have been all but guaranteed a long run in British cinemas, and a showing in a non-graveyard slot on British terrestrial television. It's a measure of how things have changed in the UK in recent years that many observers are now surprised that it is being released at all.

Bergman's film headlines a new package of six world cinema titles, entitled Discoveries, that distributor Optimum Releasing and BBC4 are launching this week in conjunction with the Edinburgh film festival. Audiences, believes Optimum boss Will Clarke, can be coaxed back to watch foreign-language fare, even when it doesn't have the kitsch charm of an Amélie or the high-flying acrobatics of a Crouching Tiger, or the guarantee of a big-name auteur (Von Trier or Ingmar Bergman) behind it - or even the whiff of sexual scandal (as in Romance and Baise-Moi). The trick, he suggests, is to challenge and stimulate them, not to patronise them.

The Discoveries will be shown in the multiplexes as well as in traditional arthouse cinemas. The UGC Cinema chain, the French company that owns and operates 43 cinemas throughout the UK and Ireland, is committed to screening all six of the titles (which also include such unheralded features as Roberta Torre's Sicilian-set melodrama Angela and Carlos Sorin's Argentinian road movie Historias Minimas.)

"What we want to do is get people to go to the cinema more often - and to do that you have to put more films in front of them," says Kate Cox, UGC's film marketing manager, as if setting aside space for Optimum's Discoveries is simply common sense. The films will be counter-programmed against the summer blockbusters. And, no, she insists, titles like Broken Wings and Angela won't be treated as poor cousins. "We don't differentiate. We make sure that in the cinema, everything, whether Broken Wings or The Matrix, gets the same weight ... we want people to give the films a chance."

It will be intriguing to see how Discoveries performs. On the face of it, foreign-language distribution is in the doldrums (the occasional spectacular success of an Amélie or a City of God notwithstanding). Last month in Cannes, the Brits embarked on their usual buying spree, snaffling up many of the titles in the official competition, but it's a moot point whether the films they have acquired will actually find a substantial audience in Britain.

Clarke remains defiantly upbeat, pointing out that Optimum has enjoyed substantial theatrical success with foreign-language titles such as Amores Perros (which grossed close to £900,000 at the UK box office) and Nine Queens (around £500,000). "If these were bad times, I wouldn't be doing Discoveries. We have broadcasters supporting us - cinemas are giving us support that you've never seen the like of."

While welcoming Optimum's initiative, some older distributors remain deeply pessimistic about the long-term prospects for arthouse fare in the UK. Andi Engel, boss of Artificial Eye and one of the doyens of UK art-film distribution, strikes a downbeat note. "It would be totally wrong to talk about a boom," he says. Artificial Eye recently enjoyed a box-office hit of sorts with Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, which garnered close to £400,000 at the UK box office. "It was our first success in nearly two years," Engel laments. "The public just doesn't want to know. Twenty years ago, people wanted to see subtitled films. Now they only see subtitled films if the Guardian, Time Out and the Observer scream that this is the film you have to see. If they don't say that, heaven help you."

Many independent distributors hold TV directly responsible for the current malaise. Neither the BBC nor Channel 4 buy foreign-language movies in anything like the numbers they did in the 1980s and early 1990s. The Beeb has shunted off foreign-language titles on to BBC4. Meanwhile, Channel 4 has almost stopped buying, and recently closed down its FilmFour World Cinema platform.

"For me, the biggest single factor behind the downturn has been the drop-off of foreign-language film on free television," says Jane Giles, head of distribution at the ICA, which has released such films as Michael Winterbottom's In This World and Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar.

Steve Jenkins, who is in charge of film acquisition for the BBC, acknowledges that the decision to show foreign-language titles only on BBC4 rather than on BBC1 or BBC2 has proved highly contentious. "But the problem with foreign-language films is that they became increasingly marginalised in the schedules on BBC2. They would be shown intermittently and late at night because that was the only way we could get them into the schedule, partly because BBC2 has become a more mainstream channel. It's not a niche channel any more," he says.

On BBC4, by contrast, foreign-language films take centre stage even if the audiences actually watching them are tiny. Jenkins says he is currently buying far more subtitled films than when BBC2 was the only outlet for such fare. Last year, he claims, there were 28 premieres of foreign-language movies.

Ironically, while there is now a huge range of foreign-language fare available on DVD and video, younger audiences often don't know where to look or what to look at. TV doesn't help tutor them. Nor is there a strong repertory cinema scene to mould their tastes. In recent years, Giles acknowledges, the audience for arthouse films has grown older. The ICA's in-house research revealed that the average age of film-goers watching Aki Kaurismaki's The Man Without a Past at the ICA was 35 - far older than the teen audiences clamouring to see The Matrix.

The UK Film Council, the government-backed film funding body, recently set up a £1m P&A (prints and advertising) fund to help independent distributors. However, this initiative has received a distinctly cool response from companies like Artificial Eye and the ICA. They point out that little of this public money is trickling down to them. To qualify for "matching" support, distributors must commit to spending £80,000 of their own funds on P&A first. Paradoxically, the companies that most need the support (and, some would argue, most deserve it) can't afford to access it.

"They do nothing!" complains Engel. "They pay themselves lovely salaries. You can only stand there with jaws open and say, 'Christ!' If you have a success, they will give you money. Who needs that? It's like the old joke about the banker. The banker is the person who asks for his umbrella back when it rains. That's the Film Council."

Still, it's hardly surprising that the Film Council is wary of subsidising distributors who aren't prepared to market their films aggressively or even to release them on more than a handful of prints. "We will support distributors who believe in their films and want to spend sufficient money to encourage people to see them," says Pete Buckingham, the Film Council's head of distribution.

To outsiders, it seems perverse for distributors to be grumbling quite so loud about the prospects for foreign-language film in the UK at a time when, for example, Asian horror pics and Truffaut and Bergman classics are doing roaring business on DVD, the NFT is reporting brisk business and City of God has broken box-office records. Even Engel acknowledges that the cliche of a golden age of arthouse cinema tends to be exaggerated. "Please understand me. I'm not complaining ... I never expected to retire with a house in the south of France. That was never the idea. We just wanted to do our work."

In the 1980s, Giles recalls, young audiences would go in huge numbers to watch even the most forbidding subtitled films by auteurs like Robert Bresson "because it was considered a trendy thing to do". The challenge for Optimum is to convince these cinemagoers that it's still fashionable to watch such movies today. "If you can achieve that, whether a film has subtitles or hieroglyphics, people will go," she says.

Whatever else, Discoveries will allow audiences to make up their own minds. "It would be unfair to say that people don't want to see foreign-language films," Optimum's marketing director Danny Perkins insists. "People in the UK are discerning, they have good taste - and they'll respond with their feet."

· Broken Wings is released on Friday.

Six to watch out for

The Barbarian Invasions, dir Denys Arcand
The French-Canadian auteur's follow-up to The Decline of the American Empire was one of the best-liked films at Cannes. Combining terminal illness melodrama with mordant political satire, it's tipped as a box-office hit. Distributor: Artificial Eye

Father and Son, dir Alexander Sokurov
A lyrical but elliptical account of the relationship between a Russian father and his teenage son, with a homoerotic undertow. A hard sell. Distributor: Artificial Eye

Mondays in the Sun, dir Fernando Leon de Aranoa
This Oscar-nominated drama about unemployed dock workers in a small coastal town in Spain is considered the strongest (non-Almodovar) movie to have come out of Spain in years. Distributor: Winchester/ Feature Film

Chihwaseon, dir Kwon-taek Im
A South Korean Lust for Life, this bawdy biopic of a womanising, hard-drinking artist is being given such a tiny release that it will struggle to make an impact. Distributor: Pathe

Battle Royale II, dir Kenta Fukasaku, Kinji Fukasaku
Tartan have the market cornered for extreme Asian horror pics with teen appeal. The Battle Royale sequel promises to be the goriest one yet. Distributor: Tartan

Goodbye Lenin! dir Wolfgang Becker
A single mother falls into a coma; by the time she wakes up, the Wall has come down. Few German films have made an impact in the UK, but this Rip van Winkle-style satire is looking to buck the trend. Distributor: UGC Films