MATCH MAKER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL Director Francois Girard's

OVER drinks following a performance of The Lindbergh Flight and The Seven Deadly Sins in Lyon, Francois Girard draws a slender white conducting baton out of its transparent casing. It is a present given to him by musical director Roberto Minczuk. There is, he says as he draws circles in the air, a lot of music in it, the music of the many operas and concerts that Minczuk has conducted.

There is a lot of music in Girard too. It's not only that, as a theatre director and film-maker he made Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin he has a sensitivity to the way music and image can form a symbiosis, but also he is an accomplished musician.

According to Serge Dorny, director of the Opera de Lyon, he "plays the piano fantastically, improvises extraordinarily, and you feel that in his directing". He is also, in Dorny's words, "a person of images" and it's this fusion that makes his work so engaging.

It was Dorny who first thought it would be good to stage a production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins. It was a piece that had caught his imagination for some time and which seemed to fit into the theme for his current season, I Am Another. He was fascinated by the way the two central characters, sisters Anna 1 and Anna 2, seemed to embody their two creators: Anna 1, the ethically rigid and constant Brecht; Anna 2, the chameleon Weill, whose musical style changed so much over the years as if he was constantly adopting the guise of another. But more than that, The Seven Deadly Sins seemed a piece that spoke to these times of corporate excess and globalisation. As such, it required a director who is, as Dorny tells me, "a man of our times". "The great art, " he says, "is to bring everything together as if it was always meant to be like that.

Francois has this capacity and I think this is typical of a film director." For Girard, what is so relevant about Seven Deadly Sins is the comment it makes on the way capitalism has appropriated Christian morality to drive its own agenda. "The recycling of Christian morals for capitalism's goals is shameless and seems particularly pertinent now, especially what is happening right now in America. I would be interested to see what would happen if I played it there, not in New York, but in Houston. I would like to see what would happen there. I think they'd go mad." In The Seven Deadly Sins, the two Annas are sent out into America to earn money to fund the building of a house back home in Louisiana.

Along the way, they work in seven cities and embrace seven different sins to make their way.

Girard turns the Louisiana family into a group Girard turns the Louisiana family into a group of businessmen, gradually rising up from the stage as the wealth builds. "The idea, " says Girard, "is to make you think of the Enron Tower, the towering of money." It was Girard's suggestion to team The Seven Deadly Sins with The Lindbergh Flight, essentially a radio play about the first transatlantic flight made by Charles Lindbergh.

"I wasn't convinced at all, " says Dorny, "because Lindbergh is not an opera, it's an oratorio. The Seven Deadly Sins is a strong work and I didn't want to have a prologue that didn't match up." In fact, it matches up with a perfect neatness, so much so it seems the two were made for each other. Theatrically, The Lindbergh Flight is like a quick hitch on Concorde, neat, sleek and minimalist, taking off from one side of the stage, the United States and landing on the other, in Paris. By the end of it, Lindbergh has crossed the ocean and, on a map at the back of the stage, the continents of Europe and America have moved together. Dollars rain from the sky.

It is these same dollars and map that link it with The Seven Deadly Sins, which begins with a similar shower and a map of the US.

"Why was Lindbergh's flight so important?" says Girard. "It happened at a time when Europe and America needed to get closer. It is also the beginning of mass media, which is why the radio is so important. Lindbergh might be the first overnight hero, a nobody in the morning but, 24 hours later, famous on both sides of the Atlantic." The son of an optometrist, Girard grew up in rural Quebec and as a young man in Quebec City was drawn into the criss-crossing worlds of music, film and art. They form the estuary where he still floats his talent: directing theatrical productions such as Oedipus Rex and Novecento which have both been at the festival in previous years. In some ways, film and theatre aren't so very different for Girard. "The room goes dark, there is a frame out there. There is an audience." At a table on the edge of the square, Girard drinks wine and tells anecdotes, in both French and English to his multi- nationality cast:

German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin, Dutch tenor Jeroen de Vaal, dancers local to Lyon.

Often he repeats himself, alternating between languages as, for instance, when he tells an anecdote about Mahler's daughter, or gives them a quick pep talk. The dancers sitting with him aren't a conventional corps, rather they are street dancers. His choreographer Marie Chouinard had suggested a group who called themselves Pokemon. Familiar faces at the Opera de Lyon, they had at one time been break dancers who used black paving outside the building to dance.