CHRIS YOUNG, producer of Scotland's first everGaelicfeaturefilm,isdriving through anonymous suburbia just north of where the London tube lines run out. We are on the way to the set of Baggy Trousers, a new project for E4 that promises to be to sitcoms what Skins was to teenage drama. But for both of us this feels like the middle of nowhere.

It would have been better to have met on the Isle of Skye, at a point where the mountains run down to the sea, the natural, dramatic backdrop for Young's film, Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle.

The irony of the title is that the Bafta committee has decided that Seachd - a film with an incredible sense of place, released in Scotland this weekend - was something from the edge of nowhere and not worthy of nomination for the best foreign language film category in next year's Oscars.

"If another film had been selected, I would understand. But they're not putting any film forward," says Young who, with Seachd, manages to conjure 90 magical minutes of feature film out of a budget more appropriate to an average children's drama.

"Bafta were not being asked to say good, bad or indifferent - they're just the mechanism by which films are submitted to the Academy," Young says. "What I think happened is that six people got a copy of the film and very lazily half-watched it, flexed their muscles and decided they were the arbiters of taste. It's a very colonial attitude and very anti-Gaelic."

Shot on Skye, the film tells of the relationship between a young boy (Padruig Moreasdan) whose parents died on the mountains and his grandfather (Aonghas Padruig Caimbeul), who spins mythical yarns for the boy but hides the truth of his parents' death. Whirling between water horses and Spanish sailors from the armada, there aren't quite seven stories in there (Seachd is Gaelic for the magical numberseven)butthefilmisanincredible achievement and a milestone in Gaelic film-making. It's also a source of some pride and inspiration for its main funders, the Gaelic Media Service, which will launch a new television channel for the language early next year.

With its snub, Bafta may have done Young and Seachd a huge favour. The controversy over its omission from the Oscars, skilfully stoked by Young, has generatedcolumninchesinpublicationsasdiverseasTheGuardianandHollywoodentertainment bible Variety. It even helped persuade the Barbican to give the film a screening in London.

Young, who lives in Skye and has learned to speak Gaelic, has a long track record as a producer. His previous successes include Festival and Venus Peter and he has certainly managed to gather the talents for Seachd. Morag Stewart, the Gaelic-speaking associate producer, acted as casting director and conduit for director Simon Millar, while Angus MacKay, another Gael, finessed the editing in a suite in Stornoway rather than Soho.

Revenge could soon be Young's, however: Seachd has been invited to compete in the prestigious Rome Film Festival and word on the street is that Bafta Scotland, an associated but separate entity from Bafta, could nominate Seachd in its best film category.

Seachd is out now