French actor Vincent Lindon has been named president of the jury for the 75th Cannes Film Festival, running May 17-28.
He will be joined by eight other jury members comprising UK actress and director Rebecca Hall, Indian actress Deepika Padukone, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, Italian actress and director Jasmine Trinca, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, French director Ladj Ly, US director Jeff Nichols and Norwegian director Joachim Trier.
In the same release, Cannes also announced that Trinca’s debut feature Marcel! will world premiere as a Special Screening.
Cannes regular Lindon won best actor at the festival in 2015 for his performance in Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure Of A Man and was back last year as the co-star of Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winner Titane.
”It is a great honour and source of pride to be entrusted, in the midst of the tumult of all the events we are going through in the world, with the splendid, weighty task of chairing the Jury of the 75th International Cannes Film Festival,” the actor said in a statement.
”With my Jury, we will strive to take the best possible care of the films of the future, all of which carry the same secret hope of courage, loyalty, and freedom, with a mission to move the greatest number of women and men by speaking to them of their common wounds and joys. Culture helps the human soul to rise and hope for tomorrow.”
The Cannes Film Festival is late in announcing the jury president this year. It is usually unveiled in January or February.
Speculation has been rife over who was in the running for the position, with other names thrown into the hat being Farhadi and Penelope Cruz.
The last French acting star to be appointed head of the Cannes jury was Isabelle Huppert in 2009.
The festival noted it has a tradition of appointing “French celebrities” in anniversary years, pointing to Yves Montand in 1987 for the 40th edition, Gérard Depardieu in 1993 for the 45th edition, and Isabelle Adjani in 1997 for the 50th edition.
A number of the jury members have strong Cannes connections.
Farhadi has debuted four films in Competition spanning The Past, The Salesman, Everybody Knows and A Hero, for which he shared the Grand Prize with Compartment No. 6. The film has since been caught up in a plagiarism case which is believed to scuppered his chances of taking on the jury president role.
After a decade of making low-budget, guerrilla-style productions, Ly broke out as a director at home and internationally at Cannes in 2019 after his debut fiction feature Les Misérables won the Jury Prize and went on to be nominated in the best international film category of the 2020 Oscars.
Actress Rapace was in Cannes last year for her co-starring role in Lamb by Valdimar Jóhannsson, which debuted in Un Certain Regard.
Trinca has been a regular guest of Cannes since her big-screen debut in Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, which won Palme d’Or in 2001.
She has since returned in the cast of Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth, which went on to win the Un Certain Regard award; Nanni Moretti’s The Caiman, Bertrand Bonello’s House of Tolerance, Ildikó Enyedi’s The Story of My Wife, Valeria Golino’s Honey and Euphoria, and Sergio Castellitto’s Fortunata, for which she won Un Certain Regard’s best actress prize in 2017
Nichols made his Cannes debut with his second feature Take Shelter, which premiered at Sundance and then won the grand prize at Cannes Critics’ Week in 2011. He was then selected for Competition in 2012 with Mud and returned again to the section in 2016 with Loving.
Nearly all of Trier’s films have played at Cannes, kicking off with Oslo, August 31st, which premiered in Un Certain Regard in 2011, followed by Louder Than Bombs and The Worst Person In The World, which premiered in Competition in 2015 and 2021 respectively. Renate Reinsve won best actress for her performance in the latter, which was also nominated in the best international film category of the 2022 Oscars.
Indian mega-star Padukone has been a regular on the Cannes red carpet but has never had a film play in the Official Selection. Hall, who recently made her directorial debut with the award-winning film Passing, also makes her Cannes debut in the jury.
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