Last Sunday, while the film glitterati were caught up in the frantic partying of the closing ceremonies at Cannes, Irvine Allan was sipping his pint in Robbie's Bar in Edinburgh. Allan - director of Daddy's Girl, the only British film in competition in any Cannes festival category - had passed up his chance to stroll along La Croisette. But that night he had a call on his new mobile phone from Jeremy Howe, executive producer of BBC2's 10x10 New Directors series. Standing on the Palais des Festivals red carpet, Howe told Allan that he had just dined with David Lynch and Sean Penn and that they were asking for him.
"I said, 'Aye, that'll be right,' and I went outside to hear him clearly," says Allan. "Then he said, 'And you've just won the Prix du Jury.' I was jumping around in the street, wailing - people must have thought I was bonkers."
The Prix du Jury is a special award in the short film category and Howe, executive producer of Daddy's Girl, had been optimistic enough about its chances to try to talk Allan into coming to Cannes himself. But the wiry ex-footballer had his reasons for staying close to his Edinburgh flat. His new phone wasn't picked up on the off chance that Harvey Weinstein should happen to call; he bought it because his partner, actress and theatre producer Annie George was due to give birth.
George also appears in Daddy's Girl, and the irony of the title of Allan's second short film is not lost on him. Suffused with a bleak, neo-realist lyricism, the nine-minute drama centres on a little girl (seven-year-old Heather Kennan) who is abandoned to the whims of passing strangers as she waits for her father outside a pub in Glasgow's Govan in the freezing rain.
"I was over the moon about getting selected and was really torn about going at first," says Allan. "To get a chance like this was a kind of relief and vindication. But then I realised that to do a film about a neglected child and not be there for your own family would be a ridiculous hypocrisy. I would have been going just to massage my own ego, and that's not what it's about."
You could say that in many ways that is what Cannes is about, but unlike many young Croisette schmoozers Allan came late to film, with an idealistic background. He was raised on the Ardenslate council scheme in Dunoon and spotted by an Aberdeen football scout when he was playing for the school team.
"I was signed at 16 and was out of the game by 23; it can be a short career if you're prone to injury, which I was," says Allan. "I worked on the oil rigs, did sales jobs and then got involved with a community drama group in Aberdeen. I loved it, but I realised that everybody who was any good had some sort of training, so I applied to the Royal School of Arts, Music and Drama in Glasgow. It was Bobby Carlyle who got me my first acting job after he saw my graduation piece."
That job was a brief appearance opposite Robin Williams in Bill Forsyth's doomed evolution comedy Being Human. "I still get Christmas cards from Robin," says an amused Allan. "But I wanted to get involved in community theatre so I formed my own company, Cata. That's when I met Annie. We toured around Scotland for years, got a Fringe First and worked with probationers and prisoners in the Special Unit in Barlinnie prison."
But after three years Cata's funding was cut off and Allan and his writing partner, social worker John Maley, began working on their first film collaboration. "When you're playing to 50 people in a community centre you realise that theatre is just a temporary moment - at the end of the night it's gone - but film captures the moment for ever."
Allan and Maley's first project was My Daughter's Face, a short film about a mother and daughter torn apart by drugs. It was a multiple award-winner on the film festival circuit in 1999. Then came Daddy's Girl, backed by BBC2, the BFI and Scottish Screen, and now, in the starburst fallout of Cannes, the calls have at last started coming in: from prestigious film agents such as ICM, The Big Breakfast and even a Canadian advertising company.
"On the surface, both films are about pretty grim circumstances, but there's a lot of emotion in there, which makes them translate well," says Allan. "It's all in the way John writes, and I think my job is to get out of the way and let the emotion blossom. I like silent films more than anything else. I'm no techno director."
But after struggling in community theatre for more than a decade, Allan knows he has a long way to go before making his cherished feature film project, Runner, about a boy runner in Dunoon at the height of the American presence at the nearby Holy Loch nuclear submarine base. For the moment, his next career move is to sign on. Soon he hopes to start work on a multi-media arts project in Muirhouse, the housing scheme made infamous by Irvine Welsh as Trainspotting country.
Red carpets and The Big Breakfast notwithstanding, all Allan can think about at the moment is his overdue baby. Everyone, naturally, wants to know whether it will fulfil the promise of the film's title and turn out to be a girl.
"We don't know, but Annie's mother is from Kerala and she says boys hang on longer to their mothers," says Allan. "I know one thing - if it weren't for Annie's support, I wouldn't have carried on in theatre or film, so maybe this Cannes thing is a good sign."
