Venice film festival

Then the Venice film festival started in earnest. Its vast programme encompasses over 300 titles and a rich line-up of world premieres, including Barney's Version from Canadian director Richard J Lewis.

However the hub of the festival is not devoted to big Hollywood productions.

As the Venice progamme director Marco Mueller says, "We don't need festival exposure for films which can get immediate attention as soon as they are released."

The legends of the Venice Lido started out as the fresh voices of tomorrow and, this year, the Venice film festival has embarked on a conceptually bold challenge to compile and exhibit a tremendously fresh and stimulating body of work.

The competition's Horizons section has been reconfigured, opening it up to experimental works in all formats, the main competition features the youngest crop of directors in recent Lido memory, and the mix of classic auteur cinema with genre fare has been adjusted to include a retrospective celebrating the sometimes critically reviled "commedia all'Italiana."

However Essential Killing, from Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, tells the story of a fugitive terrorist Mohamed. Captured by the US military in Afghanistan, he finds a way to run away from a secret detention centre in Poland. Although the existence of secret CIA "black sites" in central Europe cannot be denied, Poland has never admitted it. Taking no sides, Skolimowski portrays men as beasts of nature, with the ferocity of desperation.

In the same tone is Chinese director Wang Bing's The Ditch, a French-financed film set in a late-1950s desert labour camp.

The landscape is a desolate, mostly silent land creating an astounding atmosphere within which the degradations of the prisoners take place.

They are reduced to eating mice and the seeds from each other's vomit and, when dying, are simply wrapped in a blanket and buried. Yet the poetics of the movie gives them back their dignity. It's a quiet and provocative vision that left the audience at the festival stunned.

A significant documentary is Sasha Pirker's The Future Will Not Be Capitalistic. The setting is Paris, the seat of the Communist Party headquarters in France. The individuals who work in this building are the protagonists. Their time determines the film's speed. Their paths delineate the building.

Venice is another twist in this year's autumn film festival setting.

At the Lido of Venice, art and politics engage once again - confirming Muller as one of the great festival directors on the scene. And while the new Palazzo Del Cinema is under construction, a trimmed-down budget has made the Biennale, of which the film festival is a part, a more sober addition to its history.