AS CANNES draws drearily to an end and the silicone-enhanced celebs head homeward, the Sunday Herald can exclusively reveal that a groundbreaking new international film festival will be held next month in a car park on the island of Eriskay.

The Small Islands Film Festival, the world's first film festival devoted to films from or about islands, will be held in a mobile cinema outside Eriskay community hall in the Western Isles from June 15 to June 17. For the first time the public will be able to see rare archive footage of island history and culture, including dramas and documentaries from the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland along with award-winning films from across the world.

Among the contributors is Loic Jourdain, a French film-maker and director of Lugh Films in Ireland. He will present Fear Nan Oileán, an acclaimed documentary about life on Tory Island off the coast of Donegal. Jourdain believes the festival will be a success because islands make a compelling subject for film-makers and audiences alike.

"Island communities have to fight to survive because they are often under pressure, neglected by the state and the rest of society," he said. "So the characters you find on islands are strong and interesting, with a strong sense of history. Islands are among the last places where you can find and feel the old world."

Scotland has around 800 islands of its own, some well-populated but many deserted or inhabited by tiny communities. It is seen as the ideal country to launch such an event, making use of hitherto unseen footage from the Scottish Screen Archive and exploring how islands have been represented on film from different perspectives.

One issue raised by the programme is how islands across the world have been affected by war and militarisation. Red Hunt, a powerful account of the massacre of Cheju islanders in Korea by US-backed government forces in 1948, is being screened among more light-hearted works, such as Ealing Studios' legendary comedy Rockets Galore. The latter will be shown with rare archival footage as part of a 50th-anniversary commemoration of the coming of the controversial military rocket range to Eriskay's neighbouring island of South Uist in 1957.

The clash of cultures between islanders and outsiders will also be explored in screenings and discussions of films such as Michael Powell's 1937 classic The Edge Of The World as well as Am Politician, a documentary which unravels the true story behind Whisky Galore and the sinking of the booty-laden SS Politician off Eriskay in 1941. Allan MacDonald, maker of Am Politician and a native of Eriskay, says he was inspired by Werner Kissling's 1935 film Eriskay: A Poem of Remote Lives, which is one of the films that opens the festival programme.

"Kissling's work showed the world in microcosm," said MacDonald. "I found the same thing 70 years later when we made Cabhsair Eirisgeidh also showing at the festival for the BBC." A prizewinner at the International Festival of Film and TV in California, Cabhsair Eirisgeidh explores the social impact of the causeway that in 2002 linked Eriskay to its neighbouring islands for the first time.

"Here was a community allowing the world to come into their lives in a new way with a mixture of hope, enthusiasm, and some fear. Equally, there was the challenge to them to explore what the world had to offer, good or bad," said MacDonald, who also made the featured drama-documentary Maighstir Ailean, a portrait of Father Allan MacDonald, the Highland priest, poet and folklorist.

Billed as one of the highlights of the Highland Year of Culture 2007, the festival offers bilingual Gaelic and English discussions using translation facilities and concludes with a traditional Hebridean ceilidh. The event is being run by a partnership including the Dicuil Institute of Island Studies in Uist, the University of the Highlands and Islands, Paisley University and the Scotland-based Global Islands Network. The festival will move on to another Scottish island next year.

"The sum of our universal existence is composed of islands, physical and spiritual," said MacDonald. "This little festival will go some way to helping us understand our place in the map."