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Eastern Promises (English with French subtitles)
Location
Main screening room
Date
August 10th, 2026
Duration
101 min
Cycle
Action!

Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.

From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.

Winner of 7 Genie Awards, including for Best Original Screenplay, in 2008

Eastern Promises
Directed by
David Cronenberg
Language
English with French subtitles
Actors
Viggo Mortensen, Naomie Watts, Vincent Cassel
Origins
USA, United Kingdom, Canada
Year
2007
Duration
101 min
Genre
Drama, crime
Format
Digital
Synopsis

Devastated by the death of a young woman she was helping to give birth, Anna tries to track down the newborn’s family using the deceased woman’s diary, which is written in Russian. While uncovering clues from the journal she is trying to decipher, the midwife meets Semyon. She has no idea that this peaceful owner of the luxurious Trans-Siberian restaurant is actually a fearsome gang leader, and that the document she possesses will get her into serious trouble...

Eastern Promises
Awards

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg is a Canadian film director, actor, producer, and screenwriter. He is one of the main originators of the body horror genre, with his films exploring visceral bodily transformation, infectious diseases, and the intertwining of the psychological, physical, and technological. In the first third of his career, he explored these themes mostly through sci-fi horror films such as Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983), although his work has since expanded beyond these genres. Cronenberg's films have polarized critics and audiences alike; he has earned critical acclaim and has sparked controversy for his depictions of gore and violence. His films have won numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize for Crash at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, a unique award that is distinct from the Jury Prize as it is not given annually, but only at the request of the official jury, who in this case gave the award "for its originality, daring, and audacity". From the 2000s to the 2020s, he collaborated on several films with Viggo Mortensen, including one of his most recent offering, Crimes of the Future (2022).

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Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Shot in London, with a screenplay by Steven Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things for Stephen Frears, The Promises of Darkness is a gangster story with a familiar feel: an innocent girl thrown into the world of violence, a criminal patriarch confronted with the weakness of his heir. And yet this film is from start to finish a journey into Cronenberg's world, a world where evil and disease merge, where the body is both an organism and a machine - in short, a nightmarish and poetic version of our own real world.
Thomas Sotinel
Le Monde, 2007
Cast
About David Cronenberg
Filmography
Studies
Exploring David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
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