But for the cowardice of the studio executives, the last film to greet the world bearing the name of maverick New Zealander Vincent Ward could have credited him with just its direction. Eyebrows were raised 0when he was brought in to the ill-fated Alien 3 project - carrying plans for glass aliens, wooden planets - came to nothing when the money-men elected to play safe, and Ward himself went back to write (story, co-scripted with Louis Nowra) and direct this, his third, most artistically ambitious and successful project to date.

Map of the Human Heart dips periodically into the world of the Eskimo Avik, initially when explorer and map-maker Walter (Patrick Bergin) arrives to survey ice floes and ends up taking the youngster south to Canada for treatment for his TB. In hospital he forms a deep attachment to young Indian-French half-breed, Albertine.

The three meet again during the war, where Bergin is now a strategist with the R.A.F. and married to Albertine (Anne Parillaud). Avik (Jason Scott Lee), ostracised from his village for his contacts with white men, joins up to fly night-time bombing raids over Germany culminating in an extraordinary vision of hell on earth. Rendered in flashback, these appalling spectres have driven him back to the ice of his homeland, where in 1965 he tells his tale to guest star, John Cusack.

As with his previous films (Vigil, The Navigator) Ward here is often more interested in a fractured, more impressionistic landscape than strict linear storytelling, and the net result is a film whose intensity and ideas either hook its viewers at the very beginning or else leaves them floundering amidst an admittedly beautiful and extraordinary travelogue of images. Captured on a limited budget, the scope of the piece is astonishing - from the formidable, endless snow and ice of the Arctic, to a convincing portrait of the tensions of wartime England. The bombing raids in particular eschew any authentic attempt at reality and opt instead for a more nightmarish quality through an ingenious shorthand of light and sound.

Indeed, remarkable things abound in this picture, from the monumental coded messages Avik sends Albertine - who analyses bomber photographs for the R.A.F. - and the death and destruction of Dresden convincingly restaged in microcosm, to the arresting meetings of the lovers in the dome of the Albert Hall and atop a half-inflated barrage balloon floating high above the English countryside.

The quirky, deeply unconventional cast breathe real life into the central trio, with admirable support from the likes of inestimable veteran Jean Moreau as a crusty old school teacher, and a perfectly judged score by Gabriel Yared, all held together by the central conceit of cartography. "It's the odd, little things that audiences really seem to connect with," says Ward, and Map of the Human Heart is awash with such. Whether it finds its target audience remains to be seen, but as it stands this is an astonishingly cinematic experience of rare depth and humanity, head and shoulders above the usual commercial Hollywood drek. Genuinely, one from the heart.