Apichatpong Weerasethakul (guest at the first Kino otok presenting Blissfully Yours; and whose Wordly Desires was screened at last year’s festival) has cancelled the local release of his last film Syndromes and a Century after Thai censors insisted that four “sensitive'’ scenes had to be cut.

More on Apichatpong’s homepage.

The world’s first and largest co-production market, Rotterdam Film Festival’s CineMart, has recently announced its selection of forty-six independent film projects to be discussed in January 2007. Amongst the lucky directors of developing projects we can find many old guests of Isola Cinema (Pablo Trapero, Lav Diaz, Raya Martin) and certainly plenty of names that are yet to become our friends.
More info at http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/

Last November the biggest filmindustry on the planet released a remake of Umrao Jaan. Directed by J.P. Dutta and featuring an all-star cast, noteably Aishwarya Rai (of course in the leading role), this glamorous superproduction comes exactly quarter of a century after Muzaffar Ali’s intelligent, poetic and simply magnificent cinematic interpretation of the 1905 Urdu novel. » read more

Khavn de la Cruz is one of four directors receiving the ‘20K grant’ for his project MONDOMANILA: HOW I FIXED MY HAIR AFTER A RATHER LONG JOURNEY. » read more

On the occasion of the Peter Mettler retrospective that took place at the last Toronto Film Festival the Canadian-Swiss director put together what he calls a “mini website”. » read more

An old friend of Isola Cinema, the Taiwan-based master Tsai Ming-Liang, has — after the success of his latest film I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Hei yan quan), shot as part of the New Crowned Hope project — embarked on an expensive new project titled Face. » read more