The burst of an all-pervading laughter, an ideal of commitment to her art and her times – Juliette Binoche has won over audiences and critics alike, bringing together today’s greatest filmmakers in her world-class filmography. Exactly 40 years after her first appearance on La Croisette, she will preside over the Jury of the 78th Festival de Cannes, which will award the Palme d’or on Saturday, May 24.
Juliette Binoche will succeed American director Greta Gerwig. Thus, for the second time in the Festival’s history, one woman in film will take up this prestigious torch from another.
“I’m looking forward to sharing these life experiences with the members of the Jury and the public. In 1985, I walked up the steps for the first time with the enthusiasm and uncertainty of a young actress; I never imagined I’d return 40 years later in the honorary role of President of the Jury. I appreciate the privilege, the responsibility and the absolute need for humility.”
Every year, the Festival de Cannes convenes and explores nationalities, cinematographies, sensibilities, genres, and subjects. This is just what Juliette Binoche chose to do from the start of a career studded with some 70 films and 40 years of artistic curiosity since her first major role in André Téchiné’s Rendez-vous, which premiered in Cannes in 1985. “I was born at the Festival de Cannes”, she often states.
Four decades later, she has become an international star, and has inspired unexpected collaborations and screenplays that are dear to her heart. Her instinctive journey through the world’s creative scene soon gave her an aura that attracted filmmakers from a constellation without borders: Michael Haneke (Austria), David Cronenberg and Abel Ferrara (USA), Olivier Assayas, Leos Carax and Claire Denis (France), Amos Gitaï (Israel), Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Krzysztof Kieślowski (Poland), and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan)…
No film better expresses this boundless appetite than Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, which won her the Best Actress award in Cannes in 2010: directed by an Iranian director in the Tuscan countryside, opposite a British opera singer, Juliette Binoche illuminates this universal story mixing love and art and their false pretenses to better grasp their truth. After her fifth film in the Official Selection, four more followed, until Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things in 2023.
Winner of the most prestigious awards (Oscar, Bafta, César, best actress awards from the Berlin and Venice film festivals…), Juliette Binoche does not seek virtuosity, preferring to trust only in emotion and the elusive truth of the moment. She is doubtless encouraged, as Louis Malle pointed out after Damage, by “her love affair with the camera, and her stupefying presence and intensity”. The breadth of her performances, to mention only films directed by Bruno Dumont, from the pure (Camille Claudel 1915) to the burlesque (Slack Bay), illustrate her taste for freedom and the courage to constantly challenge herself. This is undoubtedly why she is so versatile and unpredictable in her art —her arts actually—, as she strays from movies to TV-series (The Staircase, The New Look), theatre (Ivo van Hove), dance (co-creation with Akram Khan), music (Alexandre Tharaud) and painting.
The echoes of the world resonate through this committed citizen’s voice. Education, undocumented immigration, or human rights in Iran (she protested in Cannes against the imprisonment of Jafar Panahi, and brandished a placard with his name on stage) the brand-new President of the European Film Academy also stands in the essential wake of the #MeToo movement: she shares generously and responsibly the unsettling experiences of her beginnings. She also regularly uses her influence to raise awareness of the ecological dangers threatening our planet.
Her far-reaching commitments are reminiscent of those of Olivia de Havilland, remembered for challenging the omnipotence of American studios. That Hollywood legend was President of the Jury of the Festival de Cannes in 1965, passing the baton for the first time to another woman, also a Cinecittà legend, Sophia Loren, 60 years ago. As in a lengthy, beautiful family line, Juliette Binoche’s presidency at this year’s Festival celebrates and brings together the stars of the past.
