A few stray thoughts from the end of the festival, hopefully of general interest. I still have one more review in the pipeline, which should come tomorrow afternoon.

- I am even more gung-ho about Slumdog Millionaire than Kim. It sort of ruined the last day and a half of the festival, because I've been unable to think about much else. I want to see it at least a dozen more times, immediately.

- I need to say something about With a Little Help from Myself, François Dupeyron's follow-up to the arthouse hit Monsieur Ibrahim. It's a respectable, low-key drama set in a French housing project, featuring a justly-acclaimed performance by Félicité Wouassi as a woman working to keep her head above water and her family together despite a seemingly infinite number of obstacles. It gets a bit too cute at points -- there's a subplot regarding the protagonist's sex-starved neighbor that is the epitome of "neither here nor there" -- but it's mostly the sort of solid, unpretentious film I greet with open arms at festivals. There's enough buzz about Wouassi that if you live in a city, you'll surely see it at a theater near you sooner rather than later.

Movies about ex-convicts and their difficulty assimilating back into society generally begin with the prison release, during which the protagonist typically looks downright miserable. At first thought, I recall the opening of Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66, which ironically exaggerates the hopelessness of post-incarceration by adding a lack of a public restroom to the list of things the former jailbird is without. But at the beginning of John Crowley's new film, Boy A, the titular young man being turned back into the world is high-browed and smiling from ear to ear. And this change from the expected norm really drew me into the film immediately.

Perhaps the difference is that for most films about ex-cons, the hero doesn't have a very good chance at starting over. For "Boy A," however, there's a literal reinvention taking place. In the first scene, the young man (Andrew Garfield) sits with his caseworker, Terry (Peter Mullan), and discusses the details of his release, which include his receiving a new home, a new job and, most importantly, a new identity -- he chooses the name "Jack." Also, rather symbolically, Terry hands Jack a gift, a pair of sneakers that unintentionally represents the young man's ability to comfortably run away from his former life.

• Claus Nissen (1938-2008) - Actor. Played "The Perfect Man" in Jørgen Leth's The Perfect Human, which was featured in and updated for Leth and Lars von Trier's documentary The Five Obstructions. He also played the character "Jensen" in von Trier's miniseries The Kingdom and The Kingdom II and appears in Susanne Bier's Family Matters, Bernard Girard's The Happiness Cage, Erik Balling's Olsen Gang series and Leth's Notes on Love and Good and Evil. He died April 29. (Danske Film)

• Carl Belfour (1952-2008) - Chief projectionist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He died of a brain aneurysm April 23, in Los Angeles. (Variety)
• Nino Candido (1942-2008) - Property master and actor. Worked on Bull Durham, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Smile, Timescape, Night Game and TV's My Name is Earl. He appears in Hud and I Come in Peace. He died April 26, in Laughlin, Nevada. (IATSE Local 44)

Is a person in their late twenties or early thirties obligated to put social justice above their own career ambitions? Do they have the right to do whatever is necessary to get ahead, and ignore the social costs? If they don't, and they are pushed aside in favor of someone else who will, are they noble or are they a sucker? These are only a few of the questions that are raised in It's a Free World, the excellent new drama from Ken Loach. The subject of the film is illegal immigration, but perceiving the near-impossibility of taking on that subject from the front, Loach has approached it from a fresh and clever angle, that of a 33 year-old London woman who operates a start-up employment agency matching up mostly Eastern European immigrants with employers in the U.K. Intensely proud of her meager independence, Angie (a breakthrough performance by newcomer Kierston Wareing) is put to the test when she discovers that for her small business to survive, she must start doing what everyone in her field does: hire illegals.

Angie has a business partner named Rose (Juliet Ellis) as well as an unsympathetic father and a troubled young son, none of whom are terribly concerned with ensuring her financial security or helping her realize her ambition to actually start a business that will go somewhere. They each have their own needs. Rose isn't presented to us as a paragon of virtue, as you might expect, but rather someone who is simply content to scrape out a living and be what she perceives as a good citizen, and call it a day. Angie, on the other hand, seems constantly propelled by some sort of trauma in her past -- either poverty or a bad living situation to which she refuses to return -- and she throws her entire mental and physical being into doing whatever is necessary to get her little employment agency off the ground. That's her state of mind when an older, seasoned businessman takes her into an office one day and lays it on the line: start bringing us illegal workers or we'll give our business to someone who will.

"It's all sorted! It's all sorted!" Angie yells out at one point during an argument in It's a Free World, the new film from Ken Loach. What she really seems to be saying, however, is 'It's all sordid,' which it is. Angie, played by newcomer Kierston Wareing, is a 33 year-old wrangler of day laborers for the London work force. When the film opens she's hungry and ambitious, expecting not to spend her life standing on the docks forever, but with a little luck to actually start her own firm and make some real money, connecting eager young Eastern European workers to part-time employers in the U.K. However, she soon learns that the real money is not in the ones with all of their papers in order, but the ones with no papers whatsoever. Cinematical had a chance to speak with Ken Loach at this year's TIFF about the film, what it says about illegal immigration today, and what would drive him to make a dramatic, suspenseful fiction film around this topical and explosive premise.

Cinematical: I was reading over the press notes, and in the Q&A someone asked you 'Why hasn't Kierston been discovered until now?' That's the question I had about Angie, though. This is a character that's talented, hard-working, ambitious -- why would she have to resort to an illegal business? Why hasn't the workforce embraced her?

Ken Loach: I think there's a number of answers to that. First of all, nobody knows she's good at it until she does it. She's obviously a working-class girl. You can tell by the way she ... everything about her. Her speech, the way she talks. Men have very stereotypical views of her. She's obviously had a few disasterous relationships in her life, you know. Impetuous. She puts people's backs up sometimes because she speaks her mind. So you can see why she doesn't get on. And she's very kind of flirty, so men, again, they tend to put somebody who, when they want to pat her bottom, that's not the girl they think of promoting. And she plays into it. There's a lot of come-ons from Angie. She looks as though she puts it about a bit. So that's how men will treat her.

Cinematical: Is it realistic to have a woman as the main character? Is that a reality in today's London , in this business?

KL: I think it's very realistic that she does it. I mean, there are people recruiting at all levels. Gang masters, small agencies, big and medium-sized agencies. We met several run by women. So that's nothing new at all. It's the kind of job women are good at. No, I withdraw that. That's a terrible sexist comment. That kind of attention to detail -- a lot of it is secretarial organization. Getting people's registers and finding them work, making sure they're there. A lot of it is just very careful detail, the kind that women traditionally do in offices. So it's quite reasonable and normal that a woman would run her own agency.

My favorite starting point, DVD Journal, has ceased publication, though they've added a plethora of fan mail to their front page. What I liked about their Release Calendar was the stunning simplicity -- just the title, in alphabetical order, sometimes with the original release date. If you have a personal favorite "upcoming releases on DVD" site or page that you find useful, please share by leaving a comment.

My pick of the week is Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Cillian Murphy stars as an aspiring doctor in 1920s Ireland who gets caught up in his country's struggles against England. Cinematical's James Rocchi says it has "all the suspense of a wartime film -- ambushes, clever plots, daring escapes -- but it also has a kind of gut-punch realism that's hard to shake ... in many ways it's a film that best demonstrates what makes [Loach] one of our greatest living directors." I can't find details on any extra features for the Region 1 disk. A two-disk special edition is available for those able to play Region 2 DVDs.

In Ryan Stewart's review of Stephanie Daley, he says the lack of a clear answer for the actions of a teenage girl who suffocates her newborn child is 'dramatically intriguing up to a point, but also frustrating.' I wasn't sure I wanted to watch this drama, but after reading his review again, I'm sufficiently curious to add it to my rental list. This is another DVD where I can't find any suggestion of additional features.

Georgia Rule sounds like it would appeal to indie film fans, with its cast including Jane Fonda and Felicity Huffman, but Jette Kernion says: "It's difficult to become absorbed in a story about characters with little personality and no complexity." These titles aside, I'll be hitting my local rental shop to see if they have the Korean action film City of Violence and/or the Japanese sports flick Ping Pong, both of which sound promising.

Earlier this month, I posted about a secret film debuting at the Cannes Film Festival. All that was known at the time was that it would be a compilation of 30 shorts, each about three minutes long and directed by an internationally respected filmmaker, and that it wouldn't be shown to the public. Now, thanks to an official press release, we learn that there are in fact 33 shorts from 35 filmmakers (including two pairs of brothers) and that the film, titled To Each his Own Cinema, will air on French television on May 20 following its premiere at the festival. So now I don't have to wish I could attend Cannes; I have to wish I got Canal +.

Also revealed are the names of the 35 participants, all of whom were supposed to be kept secret until the film's unveiling, and a few details about the project. Each director was assigned the task of filming, "their current state of mind as inspired by the motion-picture theater." The only individual specifics mentioned in the press release, which was written by festival head Giles Jacob, are that Wim Wenders shot in the Congo, Tsai Ming Liang shot in Kuala Lumpur and David Cronenberg shot "in the ... toilet!" (probably meaning the bathroom, not the bowl). But anyone familiar with the directors involved can imagine the kind of diversity that will be seen in the film.

See the names of the 35 collaborators after the jump.

For its 60th year anniversary, the Cannes Film Festival will premiere new films from many past winners of the Palme d'Or. It isn't known how many of these winners will have new material this year, but apparently festival president Gilles Jacob and artistic director Thierry Frémaux tried to get many of the living "Golden Palm" vets -- winners and nominees, both -- to contribute to a special project.

Each participating filmmaker has directed a short film of 2-3 minutes in length that will be shown together as a feature-length film at a gala event on May 20. Variety reports that those known to be included are Ken Loach ('06: The Wind That Shakes the Barley), Gus Van Sant ('03: Elephant), Lars von Trier ('00: Dancer in the Dark), Theodoros Angelopoulos ('98: Eternity and a Day), Abbas Kiarostami ('97: Taste of Cherry), Chen Kaige ('93: Farewell My Concubine), Wim Wenders ('84: Paris, Texas) and non-winners (though often-nominated) Wong Kar-Wai, Michael Cimino, Amos Gitai, Manoel de Oliveira, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang. There are 30 shorts in all, so obviously a lot of other contributors are as yet unknown. Only Pedro Almodóvar (also a non-winner, and never a nominee) is known to have declined the offer.

British director Ken Loach, whose Palme d'Or-winning feature The Wind That Shakes the Barley has been criticized by some on the right as a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence", is ruffling political feathers again with his refusal to take part in the Haifa Film Festival. In response to the ongoing violence in Gaza and Lebanon, Loach "joined a Palestinian boycott of Israeli cultural institutions" and turned down an invitation extended by the Haifa event (though his film will be released in Israel as planned).

The director has a long history of political activism, most recently in the shape of his involvement with Britain's RESPECT, a political party driven by its opposition to the Gulf War. In his statement regarding the Haifa Festival, Loach "called on others to follow his example and also blasted the 'terrorist activities of the British and U.S. governments.'" So yeah, you could say he's a little upset about things in the Middle East.

The combination of its Palme d'Or win and the fact that it was directed by Ken Loach was more than enough to have a lot of American film geeks eagerly looking forward to The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The problem, is that Loach's films tend to get limited distribution here at best, and for several months there was no news of any sort of deal. Thankfully, though, Variety reported today that IFC Entertainment has picked up the rights to the film, and plans to have it in theaters some time next year.

What's particularly cool about this deal is that IFC will be releasing the film through First Take (you may recognize the name from that I Am a Sex Addict/Mark Cuban kerfuffle earlier this year), their day-and-date arm tha makes films available both theatrically and via On-Demand, a cable service that is available primarily (only?) to Comcast subscribers. So, if Loach fans in, say, Omaha are lucky enough to have Comcast cable, they'll be able to see the movie on the same day as folks in New York. Which is pretty damn cool for those people in Omaha.