David Cronenberg is the president of an outstanding judging panel at the 11th edition of Lisbon & Sintra Film Festival.
Cronenberg, born 1943, in Toronto, Canada is a film director, best known for movies that employed elements of horror and science fiction to vividly explore the disturbing intersections between technology, the human body, and subconscious desire.
He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1967 with a bachelor’s degree in English. As a student, he became fascinated with filmmaking and between 1966 and 1970 created several short and feature-length experimental films. After working in Canadian television in the early 1970s, Cronenberg wrote and directed his first commercial film, Shivers (1975).
For more than thirty years, David Cronenberg has made films, such as Scanners and A History of Violence, which aim to disturb, surprise, and challenge audiences. He has also repeatedly drawn on literary fiction for inspiration, adapting themes from authors William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Patrick McGrath for the big screen.
With films such as The Brood and Videodrome (hailed by Andy Warhol as "the Clockwork Orange of the 80s"), David Cronenberg established himself as Canada's most provocative director.With subsequent movies such as The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, Cronenberg demonstrated his ability not only to touch painful nerves but also to invest his own developing genre with seriousness, philosophical dimension and a rare emotional intensity.