By Michelle Devereaux

Celebrated French auteur Francis Veber is nothing if not a gentleman-perhaps even to a fault. The writer and director of films like The Dinner Game, The Closet, and Le Jaguar (he also wrote the screenplay to La Cage Aux Folles) is so amenable, in fact, he'll even let you call him by the wrong name. In an interview the 69-year-old Veber gave to a radio station the same day he talked to GreenCine, a journalist kept calling him "Francois." But Veber didn't correct him once-and even referred to himself in a promo by using the incorrect name...

La doublure (The Valet) is now out on DVD.

The last day of the Venice Film Festival sees the screening of surely one of the most unusual films in its lineup, Death in the Land of Encantos, by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz. Unusual, even if only in terms of length. The film runs around ten hours.

Tilman Baumgäel asks Lav Diaz, widely recognized as one of the most important filmmakers working in the Philippines today, what has led to such a radical aesthetic and talks with him, too, about the unique blend of documentary and fiction in his latest work.

"There is plenty of violence and intrigue, but it seems likely that had Mr. Schroeder pitched the project to a Hollywood studio, the story would have been dismissed as crazily implausible," wrote AO Scott in the New York Times from Cannes back in May. He'd just seen Barbet Schroeder's Terror's Advocate, a documentary about one of the most controversial - and mysterious - lawyers of all time, Jacques Verges.

The film has just screened in Telluride, where David D'Arcy spoke with Schroeder, and is now on its way to Toronto.

Winner of the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year (as well as the Cinematography Award), Manda Bala "has a lot more to do with fiction filmmaking than with journalism or with much that we expect from documentaries," notes David D'Arcy in his introduction to his long and fascinating talk with director Jason Kohn. This stylized approach may have put off a few critics, but not Kohn's mentor, Errol Morris, who has told him, "This is not a movie about Brazil. This is a movie about the United States in five years."