The San Sebastian Festival will host the European premier of American Pastoral, directed by and starring Ewan McGregor. The Scottish actor, Donostia Award Winner in 2012, will compete in the Official Selection with his directorial debut.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral follows an all American family across several decades, as their idyllic existence is shattered by social and political turmoil that will change the fabric of American culture forever. Ewan McGregor (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Beginners) makes his directorial debut and stars as Seymour “Swede” Levov, a once legendary high school athlete who is now a successful businessman married to Dawn, a former beauty queen. But turmoil brews beneath the polished veneer of Swede’s life. When his beloved daughter, Merry, disappears after being accused of committing a violent act, “Swede” dedicates himself to finding her and reuniting his family. What he discovers shakes him to the core, forcing him to look beneath the surface and confront the chaos that is shaping the modern world around him: no American family will ever be the same.

American Pastoral also stars Academy Award® winner Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind) as Dawn, Dakota Fanning (The Runaways, The Twilight Saga) as Merry, Emmy® winner Uzo Aduba (Orange Is the New Black), and Academy Award® nominee David Strathairn (Lincoln, Good Night, and Good Luck).

A Lakeshore Entertainment Production, American Pastoral is produced by Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi and Andre Lamal. It will be released by Lionsgate in the US on October 21st and distributed in Spain by Tripictures.

John Romano, who took Michael Connelly’s book The Lincoln Lawyer to the big screen and participated in the writing of Intolerable Cruelty, puts his name to this adaptation of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. American Pastoral is the first part of the book going by the name of The American Trilogy, completed with I Married a Communist and The Human Stain, the latter directed in its big screen version by Robert Benton in 2003, also for Lakeshore.

Alexandre Desplat composed the soundtrack.

This will be the third visit to San Sebastian by Ewan McGregor (born Perth, Scotland, 1971), one of the best actors of his generation. The Festival has witnessed many of his major roles: his first film, Shallow Grave (1994), helmed by Danny Boyle in a debut acknowledged with the Silver Shell for Best Director; his performance as the heroin addict Mark Renton in Trainspotting (Danny Boyle again) at the Velodrome in 1996 and as part of the Incorrect@s retrospective in 2004; the screening of Moulin Rouge (2001) at the Velodrome, reason for his first visit to San Sebastian; Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (2010), winner of the FIPRESCI Gran Prix; Perfect Sense (2011), at the first edition of Culinary Zinema; and, finally, The Impossible (2012), the film that brought him back to the city to pick up the Festival’s top tribute, the Donostia Award, in the year the event celebrated its 60th anniversary. Ewan McGregor is the youngest actor ever to have received this award.