South Korean director Park Chan-wook has been named president of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival jury, Cannes organizers announced on Thursday morning in Paris.
Park Chan-wook is one of the foremost Korean directors of this century, with his films including “No Other Choice,” “The Handmaiden,” “Decision to Leave” and the “vengeance trilogy” of “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” Oldboy” and “Lady Vengeance.”
Park will be Cannes’ first Korean jury president, and the first Asian filmmaker to head the panel since Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai in 2006. The only Korean film to win the Palme d’Or was Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” in 2019, though Park has won the Grand Prix for “Oldboy” in 2004, the Jury Prize for “Thirst” in 2009 and the Best Director award for “Decision to Leave” in 2022.
“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,” Festival President Iris Knobloch and Director Thierry Frémaux said in a statement. “We are delighted to celebrate his immense talent and, more broadly, the cinema of a country deeply engaged with the questioning of our time.”
Also in that statement, Park Chan-wook said, “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.”
In an interview with TheWrap for “No Other Choice,” Park acknowledged that he had a reputation for making violent films, but said getting an audience to laugh was one of his main goals. “The sound of the audience’s laughter makes me happier than anything in the world, even more than the sound of Mozart’s music,” he said.
The 2026 Cannes Film Festival will begin on May 12, with the jury announcing its awards on May 23. The rest of the jury will be announced closer to the dates of the festival.
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