The Cannes Festival announced this Thursday that Greta Gerwig, director of the film “Barbie” and a leading figure in American arthouse cinema, will preside over the jury of the 77th edition.
The 40-year-old director, also an actress and screenwriter, will succeed, between May 14 and 25, the Swede Ruben Östlund, whose jury this year awarded the Palme d’Or to “Anatomy of a Fall.”
She is “the first North American filmmaker to assume” this role, the festival organizers highlighted. And the presence will bring a breath of youth to the Croisette: Cannes has not had such a young president since Sophia Loren turned 31 in 1966.
She is also the first director since actress Cate Blanchett in 2018 to take on this prestigious role, where men continue to be overrepresented, with notable exceptions such as Jane Campion and Isabelle Huppert.
“I deeply love movies,” said the American director in a festival statement.
“I love making them, I love going to see them, I love talking about them for hours. As a film buff, Cannes has always been for me the pinnacle of what the universal language of cinema can represent.”
“Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, dominates the Golden Globe race, with nominations in nine categories. Released in summer, the film grossed more than 1.44 billion dollars (1.3 billion euros) worldwide.
In addition to this crazy comedy with a feminist message, whose script she co-wrote, Greta Gerwig established herself as “the muse of American independent cinema,” the same note states.
He directed “Lady Bird” (2017) and “The Daughters of Doctor March” (2020), is preparing an adaptation of “The World of Narnia” for Netflix and has also acted in more than 20 films.
“Greta Gerwig bravely embodies the renaissance of world cinema” and “she also emerges as a representative of an era that seeks to abolish borders and mix genres to make intelligence and humanism triumph,” said the president of the festival, Iris Knobloch, and the general delegate, Thierry Frémaux.
Source: TSF
