Eric Lavallée

Rodrigo García is looking to direct Glenn Close's Albert Nobbs project, Mark Pellington's low budget I Melt With You will get the greenlight soon and Mary Harron will film a horror film (The Moth Diaries) in Montreal.

I think that is the greatest gift to any director – when it is as meaningful and significant to an actor to embody a character, become part of a story, as it was for Ashley to portray Helen.

I'm getting to this press release a little late, but it's worth mentioning that this year's The Cinereach Project at Sundance Institute is supporting not one, not two, but three filmmaker names that we profiled in our inaugural American New Wave 25 series.

The Afflecks will celebrate on the Lido together - both actor-turned-directors are featured in the Out of Competition line-up (see below) and will surely jet back to TIFF together with The Town and the Phoenix doc - though those chances are indeed slim. Speaking of Toronto, the OOC also features Anurag Kashyap's That Girl in Yellow Boots and Andrucha Waddington's Lope (TIFF claims they have the World Premiere, but I think we might see a correction on that later on).

Knowing Quentin Tarantino's appreciation for films that are "out there": if I had to do some really early predictions here, I'd say that the Gold and Silver Lion front-runners are in Alex De La Iglesia's bizarro fantasy film A Sad Trumpet Ballad, Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem or Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg (a filmmaker we recently profiled in our American New Wave 25 series - she spent more than a decade in Austin's film scene). I'd also add put Abdellatif Kechiche's Black Venus high up on any awards list, especially the Lido - it's a film I've been pegging for Venice since the film went into production.