Spike Lee Makes History as Cannes Film Festival 2021 Jury President
UPDATED, March 16, 2021: After being announced as the jury president for the 73rd annual Cannes Film Festival back in January 2020, an event that was then cancelled in light of the growing coronavirus pandemic, Oscar-winning filmmaker Spike Lee will get his chance to preside over the storied festival. Cannes has today announced that Lee will now preside over the 74th edition of the festival, due to run July 6-17 after being pushed back from its usual May slot due to the pandemic.
Per an official press release, the festival said today that “preparations are in full swing with a large numbers of films being viewed by the selection committee. The Festival will have the opportunity to outline in more details the 74th edition in the coming weeks.” Added Pierre Lescure, President of the festival, “Throughout the months of uncertainty we’ve just been through, Spike Lee has never stopped encouraging us. This support is finally coming to fruition and we could not have hoped for a more powerful personality to chart our troubled times.”
The Official Selection and the rest of the jury are due to be unveiled in early June.
The following article was originally posted on January 13, 2020 with the headline “Spike Lee Makes History as Cannes Film Festival 2020 Jury President.” The original article follows below.
Academy Award-winning director Spike Lee has been named jury president for the 73rd annual Cannes Film Festival, taking place May 12-23, 2020. The announcement was made by the festival on Tuesday morning in Paris. This makes Spike Lee not only the first African-American to serve as jury president for the storied festival, but also the first person from the African diaspora, as Lee championed in his statement out of the festival.
“To me the Cannes Film Festival (besides being the most important film festival in the world — no disrespect to anybody) has had a great impact on my film career. You could easily say Cannes changed the trajectory of who I became in world cinema,” he said. “It started way back in 1986 — my first feature film ‘She’s Gotta Have It,’ which won the Prix de la Jeunesse in the Directors’ Fortnight. The next joint was in 1989 — “Do the Right Thing,” an Official Selection in Competition. And I don’t have the time nor space to write about the cinematic explosion that jumped off, still relative to this, 30 years later,” Lee said.
In all, Lee has had seven films premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, including “Jungle Fever” (1991), “Girl 6” (1996), “Summer of Sam” (1999), “Ten Minutes Older” (2002), and “BlacKkKlansman” (2018), which won him the Grand Prix. For that film, Cannes served as a launching pad that took Lee all the way to the Oscars in 2019, where he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. “In closing I’m honored to be the first person of the African diaspora to be named President of the Cannes Jury and of a main film festival,” Lee said.
“At 62, the filmmaker, who is also a screenwriter, actor, editor and producer, has made numerous films that have become cult objects, and he brought the questions and contentious issues of the times to contemporary cinema. But he’s never lost sight of the public, setting out to raise their awareness of his causes in film after film,” the festival said in a statement. “Spike Lee’s perspective is more valuable than ever. Cannes is a natural homeland and a global sounding board for those who (re)awaken minds and question our stances and fixed ideas. Lee’s flamboyant personality is sure to shake things up. What kind of President of the Jury will he be? Find out in Cannes!”
Spike Lee will succeed Alejandro G. Iñárritu, whose jury, in 2019, awarded the Palme d’Or to Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite,” now the first South Korean film ever to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
The official selection for Cannes 2020 and the rest of the jury will be announced in mid-April this year.
