South Korean director Park Chan-wook has been named president of the 2026 Cannes Movie Pageant jury, Cannes organizers introduced on Thursday morning in Paris.
Park Chan-wook is among the foremost Korean administrators of this century, along with his movies together with “No Different Alternative,” “The Handmaiden,” “Determination to Depart” and the “vengeance trilogy” of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” Oldboy” and “Woman Vengeance.”
Park will probably be Cannes’ first Korean jury president, and the primary Asian filmmaker to move the panel since Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai in 2006. The one Korean movie to win the Palme d’Or was Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” in 2019, although Park has gained the Grand Prix for “Oldboy” in 2004, the Jury Prize for “Thirst” in 2009 and the Finest Director award for “Determination to Depart” in 2022.
“Park Chan-wook’s inventiveness, visible mastery, and penchant for capturing the a number of impulses of ladies and men with unusual destinies have given modern cinema some really memorable moments,” Pageant President Iris Knobloch and Director Thierry Frémaux stated in a press release. “We’re delighted to rejoice his immense expertise and, extra broadly, the cinema of a rustic deeply engaged with the questioning of our time.”
Additionally in that assertion, Park Chan-wook stated, “The theater is darkish in order that we may even see the sunshine of cinema. We confine ourselves inside the theater in order that our souls could also be liberated by means of the window of movie. To be enclosed in a theater to look at movies, and enclosed once more to have interaction in debate with the members of the Jury, this double, voluntary confinement is one thing I await with nice anticipation. On this age of mutual hatred and division, I consider that the easy act of gathering in a theater to look at a single movie collectively, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a transferring and common expression of solidarity.”
In an interview with TheWrap for “No Different Alternative,” Park acknowledged that he had a fame for making violent movies, however stated getting an viewers to snigger was one in all his fundamental objectives. “The sound of the viewers’s laughter makes me happier than something on the earth, much more than the sound of Mozart’s music,” he stated.
The 2026 Cannes Movie Pageant will start on Could 12, with the jury saying its awards on Could 23. The remainder of the jury will probably be introduced nearer to the dates of the competition.
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