Here we are in La Rochelle, halfway down the western coastline of France, at the ‘Sunny Side of the Doc’ international film festival.

I don’t know why the festival has this curious name, and no-one I have asked seems to know either. But maybe it is because one edge of the building that hosts the festival overlooks a marina full of yachts, docked peacefully, basking in brilliant sunshine. It could be just a pun.

The festival opened last night with a documentary on climate change called ‘Tara – voyage to the heart of the climate machine’ [Tara – Voyage au Coeur de la Machine Climatique] part-funded by the local government authorities here in the Poitou-Charente region. The large – 900 seater - auditorium was packed out.

Green docs, and especially climate change docs, seem to outweigh any other single topic. A German stallholder whose company develops software for modelling weather data, in graphics geared for use by climate-minded filmmakers, told me that they didn’t come to this festival in the past, its new focus on green films now made it worth their while.

That’s good news. Climate change is an issue that needs to be expressed in all kinds of different ways, in order to connect with people of different outlooks and temperaments, as George Marshall points out in his book ‘Carbon Detox’. Oceane, the Parisian singer-songwriter who saw the ‘Tara’ film last night, underlined the point. ‘It was a classic documentary,’ she said. ‘It laid out the argument in a slow, rational, step-by-step way. It will appeal to people in France, with our preference for an intellectual approach.’

By contrast, the experience of watching ‘The Age of Stupid’ is a roller-coaster ride. Fast-paced and passionate, it is a heartfelt plea to its audience to take on board the horrifying and soon-to-be-irreversible consequences - past, present and future - of the the consumerist world’s oil-addiction. Although it has its share of intellectual argument, expressed mainly through witty animations, like all the best ‘message’ films, it is fundamentally emotional. By that I don’t mean it is sentimental, or that it is intellectually sloppy, but that it is ‘e-motion-al’: it propels the audience into motion. If this film doesn’t galvanise you to take action to live a less oil-dependent life, what movie will? (Though I should declare an interest here: the film’s director, Franny Armstrong, is one of our four brilliant daughters – which actually means the film has had much tougher scrutiny by her family and friends than most of the films we see.)

We’ll have to see how the film goes down here, where the audience is international and predominantly French. It has two airings at this festival – on Wednesday morning, and again at 2 pm. One non-French member of the audience is Peter Wintonick, who made ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the deservedly celebrated film about Noam Chomsky. Peter has already made it clear he thinks The Age of Stupid is terrific: I hope he will show it to Chomsky. It would be great to have his take on it too.

Things are fairly quiet at the moment, with some people in screenings, a scattering around the coffee bars, but most people heavily engaged in deal-making in the main exhibition hall. It’s no longer a place for many members of the public: that was last night. Today is a business day.

The commissioning editors are here - I recognize the formidable Nick Fraser, head of Storyville, the BBC’s major documentary, and I hear that his opposite number at Channel Four, Peter Dale, is around too but I can’t see him anywhere. The majority of the people here are film-makers, trying to get the commissioning editors interested in their films. Or in some ways even better, they are trying to rouse interest in the powerful sales agents, who, for a tasty slice of the profits, will do the deal-making for you. It’s no surprise that there are so many small, chic, white tables everywhere – little round tables with just two or three chairs around each – for all this intimate deal-making.

Not being a film-maker these days, but an enthusiastic observer and reporter instead, I am in the festival’s Press Centre. But I’ve just switched back to typing on my laptop, instead of using the French keyboards that have been provided for us. For someone used to an Anglo-Saxon qwerty keyboard, the French keyboard makes for slow work: disconcertingly, for example, the ‘a’ and the ‘q’ are swapped, and I keep writing ‘qnd’ and ‘film-mqker’. Does French really have so much greater a need for q’s than for a’s? Que’st-ce que c’est que… oh, perhaps it does.

The most interesting keyboard change, though, is the French home for the fullstop. To type a fullstop, you first have to reach for the capitalization key: otherwise you get a semi-colon. How extraordinary to have a language so geared to the meticulous refinement of a thought that it favours a semi-colon over a fullstop!

This re-positioning of the fullstop strikes me as a tiny but practical piece of evidence in support of Oceane’s remark about the intellectualism of French culture. How very different from the Anglo-Saxon tradition of curt directness, where language is admired for going straight for the jugular; for being delivered, like punishment, as a short, sharp shock.

Ah, and I see that, after just two days in France, I have used a semi-colon myself – in a blog.