Park Chan-wook to lead Cannes Film Festival jury
Director Park Chan-wook will preside over the jury at the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
The No Other Choice director is the first Korean to preside over the jury that will, ultimately, decide which film will be awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or.
Chan-wook has an impressive history with the festival; his film Oldboy previously won the Grand Prix prize in 2004. Chan-wook then won the jury prize in 2009 for Thirst, and won best director in 2022 for Decision to Leave.
Festival president Iris Knobloch and director Thierry Frémaux have celebrated his involvement in a joint statement which began, “Park Chan-wook’s inventiveness, visual mastery, and penchant for capturing the multiple impulses of women and men with strange destinies have given contemporary cinema some truly memorable moments.”
They continued, “We are delighted to celebrate his immense talent and, more broadly, the cinema of a country deeply engaged with the questioning of our time.”
Last year, Juliette Binoche presided over the jury; she followed on from American director Greta Gerwig the year before.
Recently, the future festival president insisted that films can be a uniting force in a time of great political turmoil, sharing: “In this age of mutual hatred and division, I believe that the simple act of gathering in a theater to watch a single film together, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a moving and universal expression of solidarity.”
Chan-wook’s most recent offering, No Other Choice, follows Squid Game‘s Lee Byung-hun, who stars as a middle-aged worker whose life suddenly becomes unmoored when he loses the job he’s held down for decades.
Far Out gave the movie a tremendous five stars, observing, “The performances of the central characters are excellent, Lee in particular capturing the way a job title can become a source of confidence and even identity, and the humiliation and desperation connected with unemployment. The satire is extreme but effective, never too grim to not be funny, and never quite absurd enough to fail in hitting its target.”
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