I’m in Italy right now, after stops in England and France, so granted I’m getting a filtered and foreign perspective, but the recurring theme of my trip to the Venice Film Festival is that America has lost its dominant role in world culture, and movies are becoming a more affordable megaphone for the rest of the planet to raise its voice.

Yesterday I saw a film called ”Plastic City” that symbolizes the cross-pollination within the new world order. It’s a Chinese film about a Japanese gangster who controls the counterfeiting of U.S. goods in the slums of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

There’s a lot of talk here about the emerging economies that are impacting the cultural dialogue, particularly the booming countries that are collectively called BRIC–Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Meanwhile, almost no one here is talking about the U.S., whether culturally or politically. My trip began right after the opening ceremony of the Olympics, where Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou helped flex the collective muscle of more than a billion people who rightly expect to have a big say in the world’s future. As the American political conventions kicked off, not a single person I met on my trip expressed any interest in them. Although it seems fitting that there is a bi-racial candidate and a woman in the mix, the countries I’ve visited (and the movies I’ve seen) take multiculturalism as a given.  Once-lilywhite London is now a mecca for Muslims and other immigrants from England’s former empire, there are districts of Paris that pulse to an African beat, and the explanatory signs in Pompei are in six languages (not counting Latin).

Even the few American movies in this year’s Venice Film Festival have an international flavor. ”The Burning Plain” takes place on the U.S.-Mexican border. ”The Hurt Locker” is about Iraq. A film called ”Vegas” is by an Iranian-born American. An Indian-American director traveled to Kashmir to make a movie about a pickpocket called ”Zero Bridge.” And even Ross McElwee, the Harvard film instructor whose navel-gaving ”Sherman’s March” practically invented the first-person documentary,  left his comfort zone, traveling to South America to adopt an infant girl (and muse on colonialism) in the the effecting film ”In Paraguay.”

Next week I”ll be at the Toronto Film Festival, which I expect will be dominated by the self-pitying or self-congratulatory crud that the North America film industry churns out. But my eyes and ears are open now to a world full of others who are seizing the stage.