The organisers of the Cannes Film Festival have announced an international collection of highly acclaimed film-makers to join the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar on the main competition jury next month.
Many of them are no strangers to Cannes themselves, with the German director Maren Ade having been in competition with her social comedy Toni Erdmann only last year, as was South Korea’s Park Chan-wook with The Handmaiden. Paolo Sorrentino, from Italy, had Youth in the competition in 2015.
The French writer-director Agnès Jaoui, best known internationally for the Oscar-nominated The Taste of Others, won the Cannes screenplay prize for Look at Me in 2004.
The Hollywood glamour on the jury will be provided by Jessica Chastain, soon to be seen in John Madden’s Washington lobbyist drama Miss Sloane, first became a hit on the Croisette when Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter won the main prize at Critics Week in 2011 and the following year, she starred in John Hillcoat’s Lawless, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or. The same year, she strode down the Cannes red carpet with another of this year’s Jury members, Will Smith, whose wife Jada Pinkett Smith gave voices to one of the characters in Madagascar 3, alongside Chastain. Smith’s previous Cannes experience, though, was less salubrious – riding an inflatable shark off the beach to promote the animation Shark Tale in 2004.
The final jurors are the Chinese actress Fan Binbing, best known internationally for the X-Men franchise and the French composer Gabriel Yared.
The nine-strong jury will be selecting the winners in the main competition’s categories, including the Palme d’Or, directing and acting prizes, on the closing night of this year’s Festival, on 28th May.