Cannes jury president Park Chan-wook has long been a Cannes star, but he was never a Palme winner, but he managed to muster himself up and show off his latest film at the closing press conference of the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
Director Park quipped that he was unsure which film to award this year’s top prize.
“To be honest, I didn’t want to give the Palme d’Or to any movie because it’s an award I’ve never won before, but I had no other choice,” Park Chan-wook said with a stiff expression.
Despite his joke, the jury did indeed reach a verdict. The Palme d’Or went to director Christian Mungiu’s complex moral drama “Fjord,” starring Sebastian Stan and Renate Rijnsve. This makes the Romanian writer-director the 10th filmmaker to win the coveted award twice, 19 years after his first win for “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days.”
Highlights from the press included President Park’s remarks about the jury’s refusal to choose favorites in two categories, acting (Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden”‘s Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto) and director Tao Okamoto. It was a common honor for both (Pawel Pawlikowski, the Polish director of Fatherland, and Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrosi, the Spanish duo of The Black Sphere). that.
“If you’ve seen the two movies that won acting awards, you’ll agree with our choices,” he said. As for the director, he emphasized, “Once again, both filmmakers did a great job, but I couldn’t decide which one was better.”
Mr. Park presided over a jury that included Demi Moore, Ruth Negga, Laura Wandel, Chloe Zhao, Diego Cespedes, Isaac de Bankole, Paul Laverty and Stellan Skarsgård.
Two American competition titles, James Gray’s Paper Tiger and Ira Sachs’ The Man I Love, both fell vacant in a year that has long championed European cinema.
Director Park is the influential director behind 2000’s “Employment Guaranteed Area,” 2003’s “Old Boy,” and many other films in his native South Korea. His profile in Hollywood has increased in recent years with projects such as the HBO limited series “The Sympathizers” starring Robert Downey Jr. and the 2025 drama “No Other Choices,” which aired last year in the U.S. as a power house art house through distributor Neon.
Park Chan-wook’s films are no strangers to this festival. Most recently, in 2016, I submitted a film called “The Handmaiden” to competition. He also served on the jury at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
(Top photo: Cannes jury members Ruth Negga, Park Chan-wook, Demi Moore, Isaac de Bankole)
