By the time you read this, he will be in town for today's competition entry, Dokuritsu Shonen Gasshoudan (Boy's Choir). But not when I talked to him.

This may strike you as odd. Film festivals, as I understand them, are intended to bring together professionals of various kinds ­ film-makers, distributors, journalists, critics, glad-handers, freeloaders and so on ­ all gathered in the same place for an exchange of ideas, business cards and general cultural whatnot. Not me. I just get to talk to people on the phone.

As I write, then, Sento San is in mid-air, accompanied by no less than 11 Suncent CinemaWorks executives, plus the director of Boy's Choir, Ogata Akira. Sento San certainly intends to make something of an impact on Berlin.

Or that, at any rate, is what Stephen Schible says. Born in Brooklyn of an American father and a Japanese mother, Schible speaks fluent Japanese, fluent English and is my conduit to Sento San. All things considered, as indirect contact with interviewees goes, my conversation with Sento San is something of a milestone.

Which makes it all the more surprising that the answers to my questions are a lot more direct, to the point and appropriate than the pre-imprinted twaddle that comes out of the mouths of most English-speaking film-makers on Day 33 of a round-the-world press junket. They may be physically in the same room, but their brains are in different universes. Planet Spago perhaps.

In fact, my interview with Sento San is a model of communication ­ not entirely surprising for a man who, against all odds, has reinvented the Japanese art movie. But he's not going to tell me the budget.

"You have asked me a philosophical question," he says. "And my philosophy is not to disclose the price of the raw material. I am not going to tell people how much the film cost to make: I'll tell them what they can buy it for."

It is a philosophy he has applied with increasing success across such cult cyberpunk films as Crazy Family, Angel Dust and Labyrinth Of Dreams from director Ishii Sogo, not to mention Suwa Nobuhiro's Cannes FIPRESCI prize-winner M/Other (which screens here in the Market) and Okuhara Hiroshi's Timeless Melody, which won the Grand Prix at Pusan last autumn.

"They're all in essence the kind of films I have been making since I first began to make movies for JSB in 1992," he says. "They are not of any particular genre or nationality. They're just films that work."

For Japanese audiences or international audiences?

"I find that the things that work for me in Japan are what work best internationally," he says. "The things that affect my local area in Japan connect to the world in a wider way."

What things are those, I ask, suspecting this (wrongly, as it turns out) of being an evasive answer. Schible's brows knit in furious concentration as Sento San reels off an entire worldview. I notice that the notes Schible scribbles on his pad are a combination of English shorthand and Japanese ideograms.

Finally, Sento San stops and Schible takes a deep breath. He says (and I paraphrase): "We live in a situation which is lacking in concrete ideas. There is no strong philosophical grounding and, as a result, people experience a loss of identity. Thus the strong theme currently is personal film-making ­ speaking what we feel personally.

"Boy's Choir is very much about the lives of my generation ­ I am 38, two or three years younger than the boys in the film [which is set in the late sixties], but the director is the same age. We experienced the student movement as teenagers, not directly ­ we were all living some way away from Tokyo ­ but we were exposed to these ideas."

In the film, two outsiders at an independent boarding school set up a choir and are determined to win the annual choral competition in Tokyo by singing revolutionary songs.

"It was most refreshing for us," says Sento San, who knew little about choral traditions when they started researching the film. "We learned that the training is quite rigorous and we became fascinated by how choirs work."

Boy's Choir is part of a package of films on which Suncent CinemaWorks recently signed a distribution deal with Studio Canal+ subsidiary The Wild Bunch. Bucking the Japanese trend for films to be made by hidebound industrial concerns, Sento has raised bank finance for packages of independent films, "which means I am able to hedge the risks. There is less pressure for each particular film to succeed."

I put it to him that others have tried this and that the schemes have fallen apart when the first two films haven't succeeded. This produces another furious flow of words which emerge via Schible as follows.

"This is the fifth package we have put together, so I think that answers your question. We have a very good record in terms of cost-performance. With difficult films, it depends only how much you spend on them.

"I'm still not going to tell you that. But, by comparison with some of the films here ­ in comparison with The Beach, perhaps ­ I think it would be two digits less."