The Cannes Film Festival announced on Thursday the selection of one of today's most prominent filmmakers: Greta Gerwig, director of Barbie and leading figure of American auteur cinema, chaired the jury of the 77the Editing.
The 40-year-old director, also an actress and screenwriter, will succeed Swede Ruben Östlund from May 14th to 25th, whose jury awarded “Anatomy of a Fall” the Palme d’Or this year.
She is “the first American filmmaker to take on this role,” the festival said. And her presence will bring a touch of youth to the Croisette: Cannes has not had such a young president since Sophia Loren and her 31 years in 1966.
She is also the first female director since actress Cate Blanchett in 2018 to take on this prestigious position, where men remain over-represented, with notable exceptions such as Jane Campion or Isabelle Huppert.
“I love films deeply,” the American director said in a festival press release. “I like making them, I like watching them, I like talking about them for hours. As a film fan, Cannes has always been for me the pinnacle of what the universal language of film can represent.”
Barbie, along with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, are in pole position in the Golden Globes race with nominations in nine categories. Released in the summer, the film grossed more than $1.44 billion worldwide.
Beyond this crazy comedy with a feminist message, for which she co-wrote the screenplay, Greta Gerwig has become known as the “muse of independent American cinema,” the festival emphasizes.
She directed Lady Bird (2017) and The Daughters of Doctor March (2020), is preparing an adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia for Netflix, and has also starred in more than twenty films.
“This choice is obvious because Greta Gerwig courageously embodies the renewal of world cinema,” explained festival president Iris Knobloch and her general delegate Thierry Frémaux. “Beyond the 7th art, she also appears as a representative of an era that dissolves boundaries and mixes genres in order to make intelligence and humanism triumphant.”