Who is Park Chan-wook, who will be serving as the President of Cannes Film Festival 2026 jury?

For the Cannes Film Festival 2026, the man who will be serving as the President of the jury is none other than South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook.

Most of Park’s work following The Vengeance Trilogy was also commercially and critically successful both in South Korea and internationally, such as Thirst (2009), The Handmaiden (2016), which earned Park the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language, and Decision to Leave (2022), which won the Best Director award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

More about the filmmaker

In 2006, Park was a member of the official jury section at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival. In February 2007, Park won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival. The award, named after the festival’s founder and in praise of works that introduce new perspectives, went to Park for his film, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK.

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Festival issues official statement

“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,” the statement added.

What the filmmaker 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,” he added.