What did you do on Saturday night? The Weinstein Co. was busy, closing three deals at the American Film Market (AFM), according to ScreenDaily.com. They picked up US distribution rights to films represented by French company Wild Bunch.

• Dorothy Mills stars Carice Van Houten, who gave an incredible performance in Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and has since been rumored as a Bond Girl and signed for biopic Smoke and Ochre, Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, and Repossesion Mambo with Jude Law. (Whew!) Dorothy Mills was directed by Agnès Merlet (Artemisia) and is described as a mystery thriller. Van Houten plays a grieving psychiatrist assigned to help a teenage girl accused of strangling a baby.
  

• Dante 01 represents the solo directing debut of Marc Caro, who previously made Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. The film is set in a "space prison," where dangerous criminals become unwilling participants in medical experiments. The prisoners begin resisting; the arrival of a mysterious convict brings everything to a head. It's due for release in France on January 2, 2008.
  

• Martyrs is a horror flick from writer/director Pascal Laugier. It starts in the 1970s with the discovery of Lucie, a young girl who'd gone missing the year before and has no memory of what happened. Hospitalized, she suffers from nightmares of torture, but slowly recuperates with the help of another young patient. Fifteen years pass and she turns up at a house in a forest with shotgun in hand. (Cineuropa has the details.)
  

No word yet on whether the Weinsteins plan theatrical releases, though Dorothy Mills is the most likely to get one. AFM continues through November 7 in lovely, seaside Santa Monica, California.

Dutch phenom Carice van Houten has signed onto her next project, it was first reported a couple of weeks ago.The actress will shoot Smoke and Ochre, a biopic of South African poet Ingrid Jonker, who made her name in the 50s and 60s and is often compared to the American poet Sylvia Plath. The film will be directed by Paula van der Oest, a Dutch filmmaker who previously made Zus and Zo, which was nominated for an Oscar. van Houten is expected to jump immediately onto Ochre after she completes shooting the thriller she's working on now, in which she plays a Dublin psychiatrist who takes care of a young girl in a small village that suffers from multiple personality disorder.

With Ochre set to begin filming in 2008, its unclear how this affects van Houten's rumored involvement with Bond 22, which will begin shooting at Pinewood Studios in January 2008. Since both films will be shooting in Europe, something could obviously be worked out if the schedules conflict -- surely Barbara Broccoli sees that van Houten is too much of a prize to let slip away, so she won't let some commitment to an independent biopic get in the way of making Bond history. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Daniel Craig and Carice van Houten, in a Bond film directed by Anthony Minghella -- Best Picture.