South Korean director Park Chan-wook will preside over the Jury for Feature Films in Competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival.
This is a first for Korean cinema.
Park Chan-wook and his jury will award the 2026 Palme d’Or as the successor to last year’s winner, Iran’s Jafar Panahi, for It was Just an Accident, presented by Juliette Binoche.
“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,” said Festival President Iris Knobloch and Director Thierry Frémaux. “We are delighted to celebrate his immense talent and, more broadly, the cinema of a country deeply engaged with the questioning of our time.”
For Park Chan-wook, it all began in Cannes with Old Boy, which won the Grand Prix in 2004. 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).
President Park Chan-wook recently commented, “The theater is dark so that we may see the light of cinema. We confine ourselves within the theater 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 theater to watch a single film together, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a moving and universal expression of solidarity.”
The 79th Cannes Film Festival will take place from May 12 to 23, 2026.
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