On Wednesday this week, Ewan McGregor, Director and Lead Actor of American Pastoral will walk the red carpet for the film’s Edinburgh International Film Festival Gala Screening at Filmhouse, Edinburgh.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Roth novel, American Pastoral follows a family whose seemingly idyllic existence is shattered by the social and political turmoil of the 1960s.
Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting 2, The Impossible, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) 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.
Here is the trailer:
But turmoil brews beneath the polished veneer of Swede’s life. When his beloved teenage 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 world around him.
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).
McGregor has a deep relationship with the Edinburgh International Film Festival marking his first appearance in 1994 for Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave. He has since returned to the Festival on several occasions with films Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes, 1998), Young Adam (David MacKenzie, 2003), Perfect Sense (David MacKenzie, 2011) and most recently Last Days in the Desert (Rodrigo Garcia, 2015) when he also presented a sold-out ninety minute in-person Q&A event – a highlight of the Festival that year.
American Pastoral is a Lakeshore Entertainment production and is produced by Tom Rosenberg, Gary Lucchesi and Andre Lamal, with a screenplay written by John Romano (Lincoln Lawyer). It will be released in the UK on November 11th by Entertainment Film Distributors.
Our John Preece will be on the red carpet and we hope to bring you some photos of the event as soon as possible after Ewan smiles his way into the cinema!
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
