It is not the usual intense and dramatic Costa-Gavras fare.

"It's absolutely lighter and less serious than my other work," confirms the 76-year-old, Greek-born director, who will present his film in person at the Prince, and receive the PCA Artistic Achievement Award while he's at it.

Eden Is West, which stars Italian actor Riccardo Scamarcio, follows the journey of a young man as he jumps from a boat on the Mediterranean and finds himself in a comically idyllic beach resort. His journey ultimately takes him to Paris - the city that has been Costa-Gavras' home since 1955.

"The whole idea was to make it move with more levity, because we are surrounded by tragedies and dramas about immigrants," Costa-Gavras explains, on the phone from Paris. "It is a serious issue, certainly, of course, but I wanted to show that the immigrant can be someone who has to be accepted. . . . and I believe the more we show the dramas and the tragedies, the more we become suspicious about the immigrants. . . .

"I also wanted to show how the Europeans, the Westerners, view the immigrants. . . . I think people expected, coming from me, a kind of tragedy, a condemnation, something very strong about the way we treat immigrants. But that was not my intention.

"We have in France now something like 400,000 illegal immigrants working and having a life in France. I wanted to put a human face on those numbers."

Costa-Gavras is himself an immigrant: He moved from Greece to France when he was in his early 20s. "My culture is French," he says, "but I was born in Greece and they have a different culture. And I was there for 20 years, so I'm sort of a bigamist."

He has made forays across the Atlantic, working in Hollywood in the 1980s. His films there include the 1983 Oscar winner Missing, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, and 1989's Music Box, with Jessica Lange.

Costa-Gavras has also long served as the head of the Cinémathèque Française, the prestigious French film society whose mission is to preserve and present films from the silent era on. It houses the largest film archive in the world.

"To save them and to show them, that is what we do," he says. "It was the Cinémathèque in France where we started thinking about the cinema as an art form, and try to write books and to analyze cinema."