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| Park Chan-wook will head the jury in Cannes Photo: © Photo by LEE Seung-hee/Courtesy Cannes Film Festival |
The director's association with the French festival stretches back to 2004 , when Oldboy won the Grand Prix. Since then, almost all of his films selected for the Competition have earned him awards: Thirst (Jury Prize, 2009), The Handmaiden (2016), and Decision To Leave (Best Director, 2022).
Festival president Iris Knobloch and director Thierry Frémaux said: "Park Chan-wook's inventiveness, visual mastery, and penchant for capturing the multiple impulses of women and men with strange destinies have given contemporary cinema some truly memorable moments.
“We are delighted to celebrate his immense talent and, more broadly, the cinema of a country deeply engaged with the questioning of our time."
Park said: "The theatre is dark so that we may see the light of cinema. We confine ourselves within the theatre so that our souls may be liberated through the window of film. To be enclosed in a theater to watch films, and enclosed again to engage in debate with the members of the jury, this double, voluntary confinement is something I await with great anticipation.
"In this age of mutual hatred and division, I believe that the simple act of gathering in a theatre to watch a single film together, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a moving and universal expression of solidarity."
The festival runs from May 12 to 23
