Dinard by David Clement Davies

Dinard’s annual film festival is a decidedly genteel and unreconstructedly English affair. For a start it screens nothing but British films. They have their own Oscars, or Césars as they are called, but if it’s Cannes you want, think again. The last time I went my frisson of celebrity was the sight of Stephen Fry, quaffing a light beer outside the Grand hotel.

Dinard without the Brits would be a little like Cayenne without the pepper. There has been an Anglo-American community here since the middle of the nineteenth century, attracted perhaps by St Malo’s magnificently puritan walls, which gaze formidably across the charming estuary. The British have bought villas here, sailed boats here, lived and died here. Inspired by a vista of gently bobbing yachts and cannon-shot clouds, they have also indulged in that thoroughly un-English pastime - Art.

Artists have been coming to Dinard for as long as anyone can remember. Isadora Duncan danced through, Vivien Leigh patronised the place, Winston Churchill too. Elizabeth Hannay, one of Dinard’s oldest English residents, vaguely remembers seeing Picasso on the beach. He visited Dinard three times between 1922 and 1929 and found one of his numerous muses reclining in the sand, Marie-Therése Walter. Picasso rented the Villa Beauregard on the front, next to Mrs Hannay’s enchanting farmhouse, the Villa Solidor. Her lovely garden now incorporates part of the Beauregard’s grounds.

At breakfast in the Villa Solidor, surrounded by clematis and pre-revolutionary walls, I fell in love with Dinard. Whether you’re an artist or not, a true holiday means hot croissant and real coffee in a French garden, and in her atelier overlooking the water Elizabeth still gets a group together from the local English church, St Bartholemew’s, to paint and draw. Her home has hardly changed in a century.

Strolling down the front, it all gave Dinard a charming 1920s fizz. Taped jazz wafted through the palms below palatial cliff top homes. A sign helpfully pointed the mileage to Portsmouth and those other Anglo-French hybrids - The Channel Islands. But there was none of the hype that precedes Cannes. By the little cinema near Dinard’s main beach there was hardly a nod to Alfred Hitchock.

Awkwardly for such a big man, Hitchcock's statue is squashed between two water front stalls, a pair of birds roosting on his shoulders. With Gaelic literalism to tickle the auteur, Alfred the Great is perched on an egg. But Dinard’s eccentric, unobtrusive tribute is somehow to scale. Despite its 14,000 visitors, blink and you might miss the festival. Outside the Casino and the festival headquarters, you can often count the star gazers on a couple of lobster claws.

According to its organisers, the festival is growing. It boasts a mixture of new work, retrospectives and ‘hommages’. If ‘Drowning by Numbers’ sits oddly with the Belle Epoque, British films will be talked about in the cheerful sunlight, business will be done in a gentle way, young actors will wonder if this is what ‘making it’ means (and not be too disappointed) and then it will all be over, and Dinard will go back to being as charming and picturesque as ever.

Young artists are coming back too. Off the Rue Winston Churchill painters are setting up their own galleries to undercut commissions. As for the film festival, Elizabeth Hannay thinks it’s all rather fun, though she laughs at it too. She probably hasn’t seen a film in thirty years. But even if you don’t catch the movies or the stars, Dinard’s backdrop is spectacular, with an extraordinarily rich local history that reels back for centuries. Twenty five minutes away Le Mont St Michel towers over glittering quicksands, and speeding along the Autoroutes the cathedrals rise up like stone super tankers.

Then there is the glorious Breton countryside. Edging into the Cote D’Amour, we found seclusion for cheese and raw red wine in the surf. Above us stood Forte La Latte, the backdrop for the Kirk Douglas epic, ‘The Vikings’. Among the swelling apple trees were the endless signs for 'Cidre' and 'Calvados' and swaying back into town I passed a bar that brought me back to Dinard’s ‘coming attraction’.

On my first trip I had ordered a stiff calvados here. An actor friend and I stayed on after the festival, loving the place and hoping to rub up against a bit of glamour. But within a day Dinard had emptied. The celebs were gone and the tourists too. On the rain swept beach the sun shades were being hurriedly furled and St Malo suddenly looked dispiritingly grey. So if you make it, be warned. Dinard’s film festival is not only pleasantly low key, it is also an end of season event.

“So,” I had said to the barman hopefully, “where’s the action?”

He smiled and did a passable impression of an Anglo-French cowboy in a Hal Hartley film.

“Action?” He shrugged. “No action. Dinard. Now it’s Tombstone!”