The event_listing works like that on purpose. It's a calendarish view to events in the current context, which can be a Folder or a Collection. Since it's a calendar like view, it has the following limitations or features, regarding on your viewpoint:
- It ignores everything, which is not an Event (technically it only shows objects providing the IEvent interface).
- It has an "Upcoming/Future Events" and a "Past Events" view mode.
- It sorts on start date ascending for the Future events to show the very next events first.
- It sorts on start date descending for past events, to show the most recent events first.
- It ignores any sorting of the Folder or Collection.
But you can use collections to aggregate events in your portal and apply the event_listing view on that collection.
The only thing which is broken here is the documentation, because I think this is not properly documented.
If you want something else, like it's the normal case with customers requirements, you can subclass this view and change it to your needs.