Festival scene regular Brillante Mendoza is certainly a divisive filmmaker with his shaky-cam, documentary-like sensibilities. Like Hong Sang-soo has evidently uncovered, if you're a filmmaker who frequents Cannes with success, you're likely to catch the eyes of French-thesp Isabelle Huppert who's starring in the helmer's latest effort, "Captive."
Based on the true story of the 2001 kidnapping of 20 hotel guests from the island of Palawan in the Philippines by the group known as Abu Sayyaf with Huppert playing a foreign missionary who is caught up in it all. While the clips are in Filipino with French subtitles, you can the sense of the film's about and Mendoza's style which, if anything, seems suited to story like this. Other than Huppert, we also spotted Mendoza's "Lola" star Rustica Carpio among the chaos with Maria Isabel Lopez, Mercedes Cabral and Joel Torre co-starring.
"Captive," in fact, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last night and earned lukewarm reviews with Indiewire's Eric Kohn noting that it "lacks any coherent emotional hook or worldly argument, despite taking on form and content that attempts to command both." Ouch. [via Twitch]
