Cronenberg opens Spain's San Sebastian film festival

0 Comments | AFP, September, 2007

SAN SEBASTIAN, Spain (AFP) — Canadian director David Cronenberg's crime thriller "Eastern Promises," set in London's expatriate Russian underworld, opened the 55th annual San Sebastian Film Festival in northern Spain on Thursday.

The film is one of 16 competing for the coveted Concha de Oro, or Golden Shell, prize for best film, to be awarded by a jury headed by US writer-director Paul Auster, author of "The New York Trilogy".

Cronenberg said his new movie showed audiences the "new Russia, coming with a very brutal capitalism that reminds us what capitalism really looks like before it has a sophisticated evolution."

"It's a story of gangsters and criminality. For them, violence is a way of life," said Cronenberg of his first film since his 2005...