David Cronenberg will receive a Donostia award at the San Sebastián festival

Canadian director David Cronenberg will receive one of the Donostia awards that the San Sebastian Festival will award in its 70th edition, which will be held from September 16 to 24.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 June 2022 Friday 15:40
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David Cronenberg will receive a Donostia award at the San Sebastián festival

Canadian director David Cronenberg will receive one of the Donostia awards that the San Sebastian Festival will award in its 70th edition, which will be held from September 16 to 24.

Cronenberg (Toronto, 1943) thus joins the French actress Juliette Binoche, whose name as winner of the next edition was already announced by Zinemaldia on May 13.

The filmmaker, "one of the most singular of the last half century", as highlighted by the Donostiarra festival in a note, will collect the highest honorary distinction at the San Sebastian Festival on September 21 at the Victoria Eugenia theatre.

It will be at a ceremony after which his latest work, "Crimes of the future", starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart, which competed at the last Cannes Festival, has been scheduled as a special screening.

"Master of biological horror, of disturbing atmospheres and of a universe as personal as it is non-transferable, Cronenberg has directed twenty feature films, including works that have become classics in genres such as science fiction, horror, psychological drama or ' thriller'. He is also the author of numerous works for television", emphasizes Zinemaldia.

Cronenberg has visited the San Sebastian Festival once, in 2007, when "Promesas del Este" opened the Official Selection, three years after the screening of another of his titles, "Crash", from 1996, within the Incorrect@s retrospective.

This self-taught filmmaker, also screenwriter and actor, thus joins the list of directors who have received the Donostia Award, including Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Agnès Varda, Hirokazu Koreeda and Costa-Gavras.

The festival says that Cronenberg, the son of a pianist and a writer, "grew up among books and comics that cemented his interest in culture and cinema."

It began with short films such as "Transfer" (1966) and "From the drain" (1967), which were followed by the experimental feature films "Stereo" (1969) and "Crimes of the future" (1970). The title of the latter coincides with that of his most recent film.

"In these early works, the features of a filmography marked by themes such as illness, violence, sex, the body or scientific experimentation could already be traced," recalls the festival.

With "They came from within…" (1975) he won the award for best director at the Sitges Festival. He later shot "Rabia" (1977), "Chromosoma 3" (1979) and a commissioned film, "Fast company" (1979).

But the titles that forged his prestige as an author within the most radical genre cinema were "Scanners" (1981), about a group of people with deadly mental powers, and "Videodrome" (1983), one of the peaks of the aesthetics of the New Meat. Later he filmed "The fly" (1986), "Inseparable" (1988) and "M. Butterfly" (1993), the last two with Jeremy Irons.

Cronenberg has brought to the screen novels by such iconic writers as Stephen King -"The Dead Zone" (1983)-, William Burroughs -"Naked Lunch" (1991)- and J.G. Ballard, whom he adapted in "Crash," for which he won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.

After "eXistenZ" (1999) and "Spider" (2002), the Canadian filmmaker inaugurated a stage in his filmography in which fantasy ceased to be the main ingredient in his films. Now, with "Crimes of the future", he has made a review or compendium of his old obsessions and has had for the fourth time the actor Viggo Mortensen, with whom he has worked in "A history of violence" (2005), "Promises East" and "A Dangerous Method" (2011).