Eric Lavallée

...three years later with the Directors' Fortnight selected Play, a newspaper headline-grabbing true story that took place in Sweden a couple of years back, he details the conflict between groups via a demo of the population who often must fiend for themselves the best way they know how and under minimal, but not totally absent supervision.

One more standout item from the Vanguard programme offerings is this low budget Chilean film that garnered favorable reviews (Variety, THR and IndieWIRE) but went home empty handed at this year's Locarno Film Festival. Sebastián Lelio's third feature film (following his Cannes selected Navidad in 2009) puts a damaged landscape from Chile's deadly 2010 quake to extremely good use.

Need cheering up? Then you'll want to avoid Michael Glawogger's unflinching camera eye. Best know for 2005's Workingman’s Death, the Austrian docu filmmaker documents unapologetic ugliness in the human experience -- but could there be more to the matter than this? The Venice Film Festival selected (Horizons section) is the third part in the glo­balization trilogy.

Now that Gaspar Noé's Irreversible is distant memory, I'm now ready for rape redux. So far the timeline for Angelina Nikonova's debut film is as follows: summer debut at a local Russian Film Festival were it was dubbed as an "audience dividing" strong first-effort from Variety, onto a showing on the Lido in the Venice Days sidebar and as of next week - an assured jolt (this displays the omitance of artificial lights) at its North American unveiling.

Using a familiar backdrop of his native Sicily (sun-bleached islands plus rhythmic aqua blues) this appears (see trailer) less epic in scope than his 2006 film The Golden Door and less fable like than 2002's Respiro -- but Emanuele Crialese still works with the same obsession: free spirit status of the individual. Perhaps more telling, less romantic and more complex within this format, along with Kaurismäki's Le Havre, this Venice selected title only confirms that immigration migration due to the despairing differences between rich and poor and climate change is more than just a trendy topic.