Eric Lavallée

Of the eight projects in the Directors Lab, seven were previously worked on in previous screenwriters labs -- they include: Sara Colangelo (pictured above) who was in Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces 2010 edition, we have Romanian filmmaker Bodgan Mustata (who we previously featured) and Carlo Mirabella-Davis' genre film (not your typical Lab project) will also be included it now goes by the title of The Storm King instead of previous title On Evil.

The idea for this film came to me mysteriously, as a revelation at the end of a long journey through Calabria, my land. I tracked for a long time the shepherds on the pastures of the Ionian coast, I shot images of their animals, intrigued by the challenge of filming something uncontrollable: the beasts.

My casting director suggested her and I went to Paris to meet her. She loved the script and she's an amazing actress so of course I wanted to work with her. Playing an artist is very hard as it can come of as super fake, but Elodie is an artist in real life and that translated. Who doesn't like Dream Life of Angels?!

We were the first on the interwebs to mention Mitulescu, Dresen, Labaki, Pierre Schoeller, Joachim Trier and Bruno Dumont's L'Empire (now going by the title of Hors Satan) as strong contenders for the Un Certain Regard 2011 edition, but as usual there are a handful of titles/filmmakers particularly from Asia, that were completely off our radars. Added to the odd inclusion of Gus Van Sant's film announce yesterday, we're happy to see Kim Ki-duk again -- we hope that Arirang is a return to form for the filmmaker and the prolific Hong Sang-soo must be in some creative surge period in his life -- he will present The Day He Arrives in the same section he won last year with Hahaha. Both of these Cannes-selected films sandwich Oki's Movie - a film which he presented at Venice.

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.