South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook will preside over the jury of the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced. The acclaimed director, screenwriter and producer will succeed French actress Juliette Binoche, whose jury awarded the most recent Palme d’Or to Iranian drama It Was Just an Accident, by Jafar Panahi.

Known for a baroque and subversive body of work, Park has maintained a close relationship with Cannes for more than two decades. He premiered his feature breakthrough at the festival in 2004 with Oldboy, which won the Grand Prix and later became a cult classic. Since then, he has returned to competition with several of his most celebrated titles, including Thirst, which won the Jury Prize in 2009; The Handmaiden (2016); and Decision to Leave, which earned him the best director award in 2022.

In a joint statement, festival president Iris Knobloch and general delegate Thierry Frémaux praised “Park Chan-wook’s inventiveness, visual mastery, and ability to capture the multiple impulses of women and men with strange destinies,” qualities they said have produced “truly memorable moments in contemporary cinema.” They also celebrated not only his career, but the vitality of South Korean cinema, “deeply engaged with the questions of our time.”

With this appointment, Park will become the first South Korean jury president in the festival’s 79-year history. Until now, the only Asian filmmaker to have held the role was Wong Kar-wai, two decades ago.

The director, whose latest film No Other Choice was nominated for three Golden Globes, expressed his enthusiasm in characteristically poetic terms. “The theater is dark so that we may see the light of cinema. We confine ourselves within it so that our souls may be liberated through the window of the screen,” he said. He added: “To be enclosed in a theater to watch films, and then enclosed again to debate with the jury members, this double voluntary confinement is something I await with great anticipation.”

Alluding to a global climate marked by wars and political tensions, Park said that “in this age of mutual hatred and division, 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.”

Cannes has long championed South Korean cinema. In 2002, Im Kwon-taek won the best director award for Strokes of Fire. Years later, Bong Joon-ho became the first Korean filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or with Parasite (2019), before making Oscar history by taking home best picture, director, screenplay and international feature.

The festival has also spotlighted a new generation of South Korean directors who presented films in competition, including Hong Sang-soo with Tale of Cinema (2005); Kim Ki-duk with Breath (2007); and Lee Chang-dong, who won best screenplay for Poetry (2010). Other notable names to have appeared on the Croisette include Kim Jee-woon (A Bittersweet Life), Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), Byun Sung-hyun (The Merciless) and Lee Won-tae (The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil), reinforcing South Korean cinema’s strong presence on the international stage.