Eric Lavallée

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.

Multidisciplinarian Xu Haofeng is not only a newbie filmmaker but happens to be a novelist, Taoist scholar, martial-arts connoisseur and co-writer for Wong Kar-wai’s The Grand Master. The word on this Venice Film Festival invited title is that it takes the genre into a completely different realm - we Haofeng calling this “inner martial arts“ presented visually and aurally. Count me in!

Can't say I consider myself a fan of Lou Ye's body of work, so when word first surfaced that A Prophet's Tahar Rahim was joining the banned Chinese filmmaker for a Last Tango-like drama that was sexually and violently fierce, my thoughts were indeed I'm back in the Ye camp. I'd normally be tempted to make a last minute switcheroo as the reactions from Venice have been mostly negative --- but the performances appear to be the film's consolation prize.