The award went to another critically panned film, this one from Cannes regular Brillante Mendoza. The filmmaker accepted the Best Mise en Scene award for Kinatay - a film I avoided like the plague.
2012 will be known as the year that Isabelle Huppert experimented with Asian auteur filmmakers and we're more curious about a potential relationship drama with Hong Sang-soo than the hostage Berlin preemed Captured by Brillante Mendoza.
Today's announcement for the 2011 Venice Film Festival lineup basically crosses off plenty of sure bets we had been anticipating and makes us circle a bunch of titles we thought had a chance for a 2011 showing but now become hot items for the 2012 campaign. Films such as Juan Diego Solanas' Upside Down, Rodrigo Cortés' Red Lights, Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Headshot, Brillante Mendoza's Prey look more and more like Cannes 2012 items, while acquisition titles such as Antonio Campos' Simon Killer and Nick Cassavetes' Yellow wouldn't be out of place for a Sundance showing.
With a half dozen titles in the sidebars, the Parisian Sales Agent Film Distribution folks are certainly going to be hosting several parties. At the top of the list they've got Bertrand Bonello's House of Tolerance. In the waiting, we find the co. pushing Brillante Mendoza's latest entitled Captured - a film that features a Croisette fixture in the popular Isabelle Huppert.
Cannes is going to have a stellar Main Comp (Pedro, Ramsey, Lars, Dardenne Bros., Kaurismaki) but there are still plenty of unexpected no-shows this year. Making Venice extremely happy we don't find: Giorgos Lanthimos, Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, Aleksandr Sokurov, Christophe Honoré, Lou Ye, Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Brillante Mendoza.