One of the disappointments at this year’s Cannes film festival was not to find Raymond Depardon’s masterly documentary about French rural life, Profils Paysans: La Vie Moderne (Country Profiles: Modern Life), in the main competition. Depardon didn’t complain – that’s not his way – but others wondered why France’s premier film festival was so quick to embrace the American polemicist Michael Moore but continued to ignore one of its own.

Depardon, 66, is one of the very rare still photographers to have successfully carved out a parallel career as a filmmaker. La Vie Moderne, the final part of a trilogy, reflects its maker’s own background as the son of farmers from Villefranche sur Saône, near Lyon. Since its release in France at the end of October it has become Depardon’s most successful film since Faits Divers (News Items) in 1988, about the daily life of a Paris police station. When I meet him Depardon is putting the finishing touches to a joint exhibition with the French urbanist Paul Virilio at the Fondation Cartier in Paris entitled “Terre Natale: Ailleurs Commence Içi” (Native Land: Elsewhere Begins Here).