San Sebastian, Spain - The 57th San Sebastian film festival opened Friday in the northern Spanish seaside resort, with a touch of glamour brought by celebrities such as Brad Pitt - despite a reduced budget brought on by the economic crisis. Dressed in black, Pitt drew a huge crowd of female fans who asked for autographs after waiting for him for hours in the rain.
Spain's economic crisis has forced organizers to slash the festival budget by 800,000 euros down to about 6.8 million euros (10 million dollars).
The duration of the festival was also cut from the usual 10 days to only nine, with the closing day set for September 26.
At a press conference with US director Quentin Tarantino, Pitt said he liked to preserve his private life and to spend time with his children despite enjoying the public side of his profession.
Looking back at his career, Pitt described it as "interesting," with some of his choices better than others.
He described himself as a "methodical" actor who was able to stop thinking about the character he was playing after the day's work was over.
Pitt and Tarantino presented Inglourious Basterds (sic), which is not competing for the festival's top award, the Golden Shell.
"Vengeance has always been present in my movies," said Tarantino, whose film depicts a revenge-fantasy Western-style vision of Nazi Germany.
Naomi Watts, Chiara Mastroianni and Robert Duvall are also due to attend the festival- which seeks to outshine Cannes in quality rather than glitz.
A total of more than 200 films are due to be shown. 65,000 tickets were sold in the first four days of sales, organizers said.
The festival opened with the screening of Chloe, a thriller about infidelity and sexual self-discovery by Canadian director Atom Egoyan, starring Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson.
"It is a movie about marriage, about how we need to keep reinventing ourselves to keep it alive," Egoyan explained.
Fourteen other films will also compete for the Golden Shell, the festival's top award.
The contest had a markedly French flavour, with three movies by French directors included in the official selection.
Hadewijch, by Bruno Dumont, tells the story of a former novice nun who is led off on a dangerous path. The Refuge by Francois Ozon deals with love, drugs and death. Making Plans for Lena, by Christophe Honore, portrays a brave single mother struggling against her family of do-gooders.
Other films in the official selection include French-Turkish- German coproduction 10 to 11, about two lonely men - a collector of nicknacks and a concierge - living in the same building in Istanbul; City of Life and Death by director Lu Chuan, about the Japanese occupation of China's temporary capital; and Get Low, by US director Aaron Schneider, about a man throwing his own funeral party.
Iranian director Mohammed Rasoulof tells the story of a man collecting people's tears in The White Meadows, while South Korea's Jeon Soo-il focuses on a young woman's search for the baby she gave up for adoption in I Came from Busan.
Four entirely Spanish-made films are also on the official selection.
The festival is scheduled to close with the out of competition Mother and Child, a US movie dealing with three women and motherhood by Colombian director Rodrigo Garcia, son of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
British actor Ian McKellen is due to receive a lifetime achievement award at the festival for his versatile career, which has ranged from Shakespeare classics to his performances in X-Men (2000) and The Lord of the Rings (2001).
The San Sebastian film festival is seeking to contrast its populist character to the elitism of star-studded Cannes, the daily La Vanguardia reported, estimating the number of visitors to the festival at 200,000.
