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 Oscar-nominated "A History of Violence."
The film, which won the people's choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, was warmly received by critics and the audience at San Sebastian.
It stars US actor Viggo Mortensen, who also appeared in "A History of Violence," as well as Australia's Naomi Watts and France's Vincent Cassel.
Watts plays a slightly naive nurse whose efforts to track down the family of a baby she delivered gets her involved with the Russian mafia.
Mortensen, whose role includes a naked fight in a steam room, said he spent time with Russians in the United States as well as two weeks in Russia to prepare to play heavily-tattooed ex-convict Nikolai.
"A lot of movies have been made about the criminal world but I think London has never been shown this way before," he said in Spanish to the delight of the audience.
"Eastern Promises" is the only film in competition at the San Sebastian festival to be shown to the public on Thursday.
Two competition films will be screened on Friday: British director Nick Broomfield's "Battle for Haditha" about the Iraq war and Spanish director Iciar Bollain's "Mataharis" about three female private detectives.
Several US stars, including Demi Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Gere, are expected to appear at the festival, the oldest and most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world.
Gere and Norway's Liv Ullmann are to receive special lifetime achievement awards.
Winners will be announced on the last day of the festival on September 29.
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