Marina de Van

The Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival , Oct 1-12 2009, has an impressive female-directed lineup this year!

Sci-fi/comedy Cold Souls (Sophie Bartes), historical horror The Countess (Julie Delpy), creepy drama Ne te Retourne Pas (Marina de Van), action war movie The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), serial killer documentary Cropsey (Barbara Brancaccio with Joshua Zeman), surrealist horror Amer (Hélène Cattet with Bruno Forzani), and animated fantasy The Secret of Kells (Nora Twomey with Tomm Moore.)

Grace, the hororr film by Scary Studs Paul Solet (February 2007) and Adam Green (August 2007), also makes an appearance. Watch the trailers for the films below...

Check out actress Sophie Marceau and director Marina de Van (In My Skin) talking about their new thriller Ne Te Retourne Pas which premiered at Cannes this past week:

Bright Star, Jane Campion's latest movie (she directed In The Cut and The Piano), is in the competition at the Cannes 2009 Film Festival. The gothic romance is based on the three-year relationship between 19th century Romantic poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which was cut short by Keats' untimely death at age 25.

Out of competition is Marina de Van's latest psychodrama (she directed the gory In My Skin) about eerie physical experiences called Ne te retourne pas starring Monica Belluci and Sophie Marceau...

Directed & Written by Marina de Van
Starring Marina de Van
2002
Reviewed by Andrew Shearer

I've always felt that the human body is a pretty weird machine, and there are some fairly universal situations I can think of that prove this point. You feel something stuck in your shoe, like a little rock or something, maybe it's s sharp jab and you think there's a needle in your sock. But when you take your shoe off and find what was poking you, it's always some teeny tiny little speck of nothing. Why did it feel so spectacularly huge? And then, there are those times when you notice some dried blood on your hand, and you clean it away to find a cut that you have NO IDEA how you got. Why didn't you feel yourself getting cut? Because you didn't see it? Things like this can make us question our very relationship with pain and with our bodies in general. You've all heard of mind over matter, about the dudes that can walk across hot coals and not run around screaming like Daffy Duck. Is pain really a matter of perception sometimes? Just how much are we defined by our own bodies? See, I told you. Weird.