SCOTTISH Screen's three-hour breakfast party yesterday on the yacht, The Lady Jersey, was only one of the events at which Scotland's film-makers have been making their mark in Cannes. Everyone who was anyone associated with Scottish film, and most of the wannabes, were there feasting on sausages and bacon, fruit salad, and haggis-filled spring rolls, washed down with champagne and orange juice, individually or together. The nautical goings on were presided over by John Archer wearing a psychedelic tie.

Top producer Lynda Myles, one of those having her breakfast, said she had still to fix up distribution for her film Life of Stuff starring Ewan Bremner and based on the play by Simon Donald which was a hit at the Traverse a few years back. It will, however, be screened next month for a week in Glasgow and Edinburgh. One of the problems she has come up against, other than the fact there is a backlog of British movies looking for screens, is that it was partly financed by the BBC, which means there are no TV sales for the distributors. Myles says the cast is fantastic, the comedy black, and the material controversial.

Her planned film about the theft of the Stone of Destiny should start shooting early next year and is backed by BBC Films. She said she wanted to find a director who would not treat the story purely as comedy, although there were elements of farce about the affair, and she has found him. Over the fruit salad she produced John McKay, a North Berwick-born National Film School graduate who shares her view that the heart of the tale is the idealism which inspired the thieves. He has a short film, Doom and Gloom, showing in the Cannes Festival which Myles says is one of the funniest she has seen. Set in a Scottish fishing village where it always rains and the inhabitants are a miserable lot, according to McKay, things change after the minister prays for better weather and his prayers are answered. The Mediterranean climate causes the inhabitants to start eating pasta, hold parties, discuss philosophy,

and have wild affairs. Then the Moderator of the General Assembly comes to town.

He has two other films which he hopes to make - one for BBC Films called Sunnystone and one for Film 4, where they have a slightly more controversial approach to life, called The Sad F*****s Club. He says he would have filmed Doom and Gloom in North Berwick but when he got there and looked at his birthplace through the camera it did not look as miserable as it does in real life.

Another Scots film-maker, Lynne Ramsay, who won the Festival prize two years ago for her short, has one in the competition again called Gasman and is due to start work any day now on her first feature for BBC Films. Called the Rat Catcher, it's set in Glasgow during a garbage strike and is about a young boy coming to terms with life. It is said to be a powerful coming-of-age story.

Sally Hibben, who produced Ken Loach's last film Land and Freedom, written by Glasgow lawyer Paul Laverty, has a new Scottish project in hand. She has most of the finance in place from various European sources and hopes that Scottish Screen will come up with the rest. To be directed by Phil Davis, who made ID, the English football hooligan film now out on video in France to show them what to expect, she says this one is a powerful story which should move audiences.

It is about a couple of kids who have been abused who go on the run and head for Orkney with their pet bull terrier for company. She hopes that Crow Road's Joseph McFadzean will star. On the way the boy and girl meet a

middle-aged lady who Hibben says is ex-Army and gay and dying. This complicated formula is because it is totally impossible to describe the lady as a dying dyke.

The Glasgow actress Laura Fraser, who scored a success in Berlin with Jeroen Krabbe's film Left Luggage about Antwerp Jews facing up to life after the Holocaust, and who got to go to bed with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Man in the Iron Mask, has made a considerable impression in Divorcing Jack which is being shown in the marketplace. A very funny black comedy set in an about-to-become independent Northern Ireland, she plays the femme fatale and Variety, the showbusiness gospel, says she makes ''a tremendous impact''. Nobody could disagree.

The toast of Cannes is the Glasgow actor, writer, and director Peter Mullan for his performance in Ken Loach's new film My Name is Joe. He plays a reformed alcoholic and so far is the hottest tip for best actor. But prizes are not what Mullan is after and he says he is already famous in Scotland because he was in Braveheart in a scene in which he stood next to actor David McKay who is also in Joe. Mullan had the line, McKay had none.

''Every time we go into the pub together someone will come up to Dave and say, 'I know you, you were in Braveheart','' he says.

''Davie says, pointing at me, 'But so was he'. It will be written on my tombstone, 'Here lies the man who stood next to Davie McKay'.'' Mullan reckons that McKay is so good in Joe that it's going to continue like this.

Although he is enjoying the Cannes high life, he denies he is a champagne socialist. ''I am more of a Mouton Cadet one,'' he said at the Scottish breakfast. ''It is at events like this you realise there is more to life than Buckfast.''