A new-look film festival teaming up with Leeds could be the answer to winning a bigger tourist audience.

Film critic Phillip Bergson, speaking at yesterday's One City Lunch event, called for Bradford to focus on producing a larger-scale film and arts festival which could rival Cannes.

Mr Bergson, who went to Bradford Grammar School and is now film critic for the BBC's World Service, said the world's first film festival was created to boost tourism in Venice in the 1930s and the same could happen now in Bradford if the city threw itself behind the idea.

He said the potential behind festivals was enormous and Bradford had the potential to build on its own film festival now running in its 11th year, possibly moving it to a warmer time of year and linking it to the Bradford Festival.

"Film is the most accessible of all the arts, it's not elitist. Bradford could use film as a way of re-creating itself. The scale and scope of what could be done in Bradford is rich but it's having the will to do it," he said.

He told businesspeople at the One City lunch event, one of a series backed by the Telegraph & Argus, the city should look to its National Museum of Photography, Film & Television as one of its leading strengths.

It could then act as a magnet for a much bigger festival which could stretch across the whole of Yorkshire using other smaller towns as satellite venues. He even hinted at a joint Leeds-Bradford Film Festival. Mr Bergson, who is also an international consultant at the NMPFT, also talked about his wish to see the doomed Odeon building, once Europe's biggest cinema, saved and restored to become part of the museum instead of being demolished as part of a massive regeneration scheme for the city centre.

He said: "The New Victoria Cinema Odeon building could be saved and become a part of the museum used as a space for films, exhibitions and arts which would help put Bradford on the map for its hospitality to the arts."

The 11th Bradford Film Festival runs until this Saturday.