Since January 15, 2020, we know that Spike Lee will chair the jury of the Cannes Film Festival. That day, Thierry Frémaux, the general delegate of the event, announced that the author of Do The Right Thing would award the Palme d’Or for the 73e edition scheduled for the following spring. The coronavirus decided otherwise and the Croisette had to do without a festival.
But Spike Lee is still at the helm for the 74e edition, the one that will really take place, in Cannes, from July 6 to 17. It took more than eighteen months and this morning of June 23 to know who will surround him to decide between the twenty-four films in competition.
They will be eight, five women and three men. French and Senegalese director Mati Diop, whose first feature film, Atlantic, won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019; her Austrian colleague Jessica Hausner, whose first English-language film, Little joe, won an acting award for Emily Beecham the same year; French director and actress Mélanie Laurent, who played for Quentin Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds and also directed the thriller Breathe that the documentary Tomorrow (with Cyril Dion); American actress and producer Maggie Gyllenhaal, who navigates between major studio productions (The dark knight), independent cinema (Sherry Baby, Crazy Heart) and the series (The Deuce) and is about to move on to realization. And Mylène Farmer. Since her first clip, the singer and songwriter has shown her close affinity with cinema.
Opening July 6
Already in 2009, the jury chaired by Isabelle Huppert was predominantly female, as were those headed by Jane Campion in 2014 and Cate Blanchett in 2018.
To this quintet of jurors is added a duo of actors formed by the French Tahar Rahim, revealed in Cannes in 2009 with a prophet by Jacques Audiard (filmmaker who will be competing this year with The Olympics), who has since become a transatlantic actor (we will see him in Rebecca Miller’s next film) and the South Korean Song Kang-ho, chosen interpreter of Bong Joon-ho (he also played well in Memories of Murder that in Parasite) but also collaborator of Hong Sang-soo or Park Chan-wook. Finally, Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius, Bacurau, who both competed for the Palme d’Or) complete the cohort who will discover the foreshadowing of the cinema of the next world.
The 74th Cannes Film Festival will open on July 6 with the screening of the first of the films in competition, Annette, the musical written by the Sparks and directed by Leos Carax, with Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver.