Roger Gibson hopes UKIP’s proclamations are correct. For the first time since 1991, he’s made European cinema the focus of the annual Chichester International Film Festival.

“The big emphasis is on east meets west,” he says, before joking, “If all those people who are supposed to be coming over from Eastern Europe to England have really made it over then we’ll get some full houses.”

Seventy per cent of the 110 films and events in this year’s event have European roots. Fifty per cent of those are non-UK films.

Movies from Croatia, Estonia, Kosovo, Moldova and four from Slovenia are on the bill.

There are 13 UK premieres and 22 films in total in the East Meets West section. It makes “a rare treat for cinemagoers,” adds Gibson, who challenges audiences to name another UK film festival doing anything similar.

Gibson decided to explore Eastern European cinema after being advised the funding body Creative Europe wanted applicants to encourage film-makers and audiences in smaller countries.

He had his eyes on a grant from the body, which demands festivals screen 70% European films.

“That was the genesis but we didn’t get the grant.”

The funding body might have pulled out but Gibson ploughed on regardless. He has produced the biggest festival to date and created a line-up for Europhiles.

British director Tony Palmer presents the documentary on Dvorák he originally made for Czechoslovakian television in 1988. The Communist government refused to air Palmer’s story about Dvorák final composition, The Cello Concerto.

“Perhaps it was too nationalistic,” says Gibson, who laments that cellist Julian Lloyd Webber has retired and cannot accompany the screening of Dvorák – In Love?

Lloyd Webber played on a new recording from the 1988 concert in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Václav Neumann.

The UK premiere of Czech director Jiri Menzel’s latest film, The Don Juans - “a delicious romp accompanied by the music of Mozart and Don Giovanni” – is another pick from the Eastern Europe collection.

“He wrote the script about an opera director who doesn’t like opera. He is using the opera as a means to bed singers. It is very much like Jiri himself and is a reference to Mozart’s lothario Don Giovanni, based on the legend Don Juan.”

Picks from Western Europe include the four Paolo Sorrentino films which preceded his magisterial portrait of the 21st century Roman intellectual elite, The Great Beauty, including his 2001 debut One Man Up.

“Sorrentino blends flawless writing with a visually resplendent directorial style,” says Gibson, who explains The Great Beauty’s success was another reason they decided to focus on European cinema in 2014.

He’s pulled off a real coup by tempting Warner Bros to allow Chichester to close the festival with Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight.

Evergreen Allen, whose private life commands as many column inches as his movies, might not be the most controversial man with work showing in the festival.

Frenchman Gérard Depardieu, Russian tax exile and recent recipient of a fine for drink driving his scooter in Paris, strips to the bare essentials in Welcome To New York.

He plays a disgraced former head of a global banking institution who is reportedly based on ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose lawyers have contacted director Abel Ferrara.

Gibson calls Depardieu’s appearance courageous. “In the introduction Depardieu says he doesn’t like the character and I don’t know that he needed to make it.”

Depardieu, as prostitute loving George Devereaux, does a striptease in a tent on the beach which leaves nothing to the imagination.

“It has the British Board of Film Classification clearance,” says Gibson, who managed to squeeze into the eagerly anticipated premiere in Cannes.

He remembers “a mixture of shock and amazement in the auditorium. Some loved it and some hated it. It is perfect film festival material.”