South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook will preside over the competition jury at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, running May 12-23.
The director, screenwriter and producer returns to the Croisette after winning the best director prize in 2022 for Decision To Leave. All of his films that played in the festival’s competition have earned awards including the grand prix in 2014 for Old Boy, the Jury prize in 2009 for Thirst, and a technical prize (the CST Award for best artist-technician) for The Handmaiden in 2016.
The festival has not had an Asian jury president since Wong Kar Wai in 2006 and Park is the first from South Korea to be named competition jury president. Bong Joon-ho presided over the Caméra d’or Jury in 2011.
“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,” the festival’s president Iris Knobloch and director Thierry Frémaux said in a statement. They added: “We are delighted to celebrate his immense talent and, more broadly, the cinema of a country deeply engaged with the questioning of our time.”
Park’s last film No Other Choice world-premiered in Venice’s competition last year and was shortlisted for the 2026 best international feature film Oscar. His vast filmography includes family drama Stoker starring Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska and box office hit JSA (Joint Security Area) that broke the South Korean record in 2000.
In its statement, the festival said that Park’s work “embodies the DNA of contemporary Korean cinema in every way: free from conventions, audience-oriented, ambitious, deliberately provocative, and sophisticated without being intellectualised”.
Park said of the appointment: “To be enclosed in a theatre to watch films, and enclosed again to engage in debate with the members of the jury, this double, voluntary confinement is something I await with great anticipation. In this age of mutual hatred and division, I believe that the simple act of gathering in a theatre to watch a single film together, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a moving and universal expression of solidarity.”
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