The 77th Cannes Film Festival, which will take place from May 14 to 25, announced this Tuesday evening, the president of the Caméra d’or jury. Or rather the co-presidents of the jury. It is in fact a tandem which will, this year, be at the head of the jury responsible, since 1978, for awarding the prize for best first film, all sections combined (Official Competition, Un Certain Regard, Quinzaine des filmmakers and Semaine de la Critical). They will be the French actress Emmanuelle Béart and the Belgian musician and director of Congolese origin Baloji. Which had been shunned by the Magrittes a few weeks ago for his last film Augur, who had nevertheless been chosen to represent Belgium at the Oscars. Baloji’s first feature film was unveiled in 2023 in the Un Certain Regard section of the official selection on the Croisette, where he won the New Voice prize.
According to the Cannes Film Festival, it is a “obvious tandem, because these two artists freed from limits, move through their art towards a freedom of tone and creation”. “Through her impressive filmography and her humanitarian commitment, Emmanuelle Béart defends a cinema that is shared, that emancipates, that allows us to go beyond borders and live together. In his first feature film with impressive plastic mastery, Baloji, gives us a chronicle transcending otherness through the prism of magical realism”comments the festival in its press release.
This is the fourth time that a duo has chaired the Caméra d’or, after Françoise Fabian and Daniel Schmid in 1996, Marthe Keller and Géraldine Chaplin in 2002 and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne in 2006. To find the successor of The Golden Butterfly Tree by the Vietnamese Pham Thien An (awarded last year by the jury chaired by the actress Anaïs Demoustier), Emmanuelle Béart and Baloji will be assisted by the Belgian director Zoé Wittock (author of the very beautiful first film Jumbo in 2020), the French director of photography Gilles Porte, the French producer Pascal Buron and the head of the cinema section of the French press group Ebra Nathalie Chifflet.
“Jumbo”, a disproportionate love story
