If you are looking for a neat distillation of the genius of the director Claire Denis, look no further than her latest film, the exquisitely understated 35 Shots of Rum. There is one particular extended scene — the heart of the film — that encapsulates her empathy and humanism, her lyricism and lightness of touch. The scene takes place in a café at night, where a father, his daughter and two close family friends take shelter from a rainstorm. Someone puts the Commodores’ Nightshift on the jukebox and the slow dancing starts. The air is thick with tension and tacit longing. Denis weaves magic out of the stolen glances and the almost imperceptible hesitations that reveal the souls of her characters. By the end of the song, one heart has been broken and one is full to bursting point. The girl has started to fall in love; the father has realised that soon he is going to have to let her go.

There are few directors currently working with Denis’ skill in capturing the ebb and flow and the unspoken undercurrents of human interaction.

During a flying visit to the Edinburgh Film Festival, Denis downplays the elegant emotional choreography of the scene. “It was planned, but not like a ballet,” she says. “But it was planned from all angles. Like what the location expresses — warm but simple, not decorated. In the script it was described as a little warm oasis in the rain. Of course I figured out how I was going to break down the scene. But when you know exactly what you want, it’s not difficult. I know the music, I know the actors — some of them I have worked with for a long time.”

This is arguably the director’s most personal work since she explored her childhood memories of growing up in France’s African colonies in her semi-autobiographical feature debut Chocolat. An intimate portrait of the close relationship between a widowed father and his only daughter, 35 Shots of Rum is partially inspired by Denis’ mother’s relationship with her own father.

“My grandfather was a sort of hero when I, my brother and sister were small because he was my mother’s hero,” she says. “My mother and father were very close and they still are. But for my mother there was a kind of permanent nostalgia or melancholy about her life with her father. We couldn’t believe it. We thought it was not the job of a father to be so charming.

“I remember when my grandfather died. I was 12. My mother looked to me like a little girl, she was lost. I felt at the time: ‘If my father died now, I would never be as sad as my mother’. Years after I saw an Ozu film called Late Spring, about a father and a daughter. And I started crying. And I took my mother and she cried as well. She said: ‘I thought it was only my story. But this film tells me I’m not the only one’.”

Denis’s relationship with her own father, a French Government official who hauled his family around the former French colonies, seems rather more conventional. “My father wanted me to be a teacher of history or geography. That was his dream. I studied economics because it was near to the cinema school. I had absolutely no interest in economics. It took him a long time to understand my choice. ”

He would, she says, never tell her he was proud of her achievements.

Denis married very young, which meant she was free to give up on her father’s preferred career path. Shortly afterwards, however, she decided to return to college, this time to study film. The marriage didn’t work out but the passion for cinema became a lifelong love affair.

Her main film-making education came when, as a young woman, she worked as an assistant to directors such as Jacques Rivette, Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders, then established her own voice with films such as Chocolat, Nénette and Boni, Vendredi soir and her acknowledged masterpiece, Beau travail.

What’s the key to the intimacy and the poetry of flickering emotions in her work? Most probably it has something to do with the fact that she really, really loves her actors. And regular collaborators such as Alex Descas and Grégoire Colin (both of whom star in 35 Shots of Rum) will attest that the respect is mutual.

But the way Denis tells it she can be a formidable presence on set. “I scream at the crew often. I am a very bad-tempered person. I have a tendency to burst into anger and crisis. “But not with actors. If I lose my temper with them, they are exposed. To scream at someone who is acting to get a better result . . . I would prefer to die.”

35 Shots of Rum opens on July 10

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