It was about a year ago that speculation first cropped up that controversial helmer Brillante Mendoza — who won a divisive Best Director award at Cannes for his audience-splitting "Kinatay" — would return to the Croisette with his latest effort, "Captured." The film was apparently in post-production and headed to the finish line…and then word went quiet.
Well, the movie is now in the can and headed to Berlin, and some fresh images have cropped up to give us a taste. Isabelle Huppert continues her journey through the foreign arthouse world (she also stars in Hong Sang-Soo's upcoming "In Another Country" — first image here) by featuring here alongside Katherine Mulville, Marc Zanetta, Maria Isabel Lopez and Rustica Carpio in the based-on-a-true-story tale of Thérèse Bourgoin (Huppert), a French woman who worked for a humanitarian organization on Palawan Island in the Philippines only to be kidnapped by mistake along with a colleague by the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf, who were in the region fighting for Mindanao independence.
It's certainly some charged material and these first glimpses point to a film that dosen't see Mendoza straying away from provocative subject matter. We'll soon learn how it turns out. The Berlin Film Festival runs from February 9-19.
