South Korean Old Boy and No Other Choice director Park Chan-wook has been named as president of the jury for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, running from May 12 to May 23.
The director, screenwriter and producer follows in the wake of Juliette Binoche who presided over the 2025 jury which feted Iranian director Jafar Panahi as he returned to Cannes for the first time in 15 years with the Palme d’Or for his drama It Was Just An Accident.
“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.”
The honor sees Park return to familiar territory. He has world premiered four features in Competition in Cannes, kicking off with Oldboy in 2004, which won the Grand Jury Prize winner; followed by Jury Prize winner Thirst (2009), The Handmaiden (2016) and Decision to Leave (2022), for which he won best director.
Responding to the honor, Park 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.”
Cannes likened Park’s work to that of filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma, and David Fincher “for artistry in composing images whose formal beauty is matched only by their moral rigor.”
Looking back over his career trajectory, the festival recounted how Park first started dreaming of becoming a film director after discovering Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock.
“The English master has permeated his work, down to the composition of certain shots and sets, with a sense of aesthetics tinged with surrealism,” it said.
Cannes noted how Park had drawn freely on Hitchcock’s 1943 crime thriller Shadow of a Doubt for his family drama Stoker (2013), starring Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, while the UK director’s influence was also evident in Decision to Leave.
The festival also name-checked Park’s most recent film No Other Choice (2025); as well as Sympathy for Mister Vengeance (2002) and Lady Vengeance (2005), the first and third film in a trilogy, which included Oldboy and his breakout third film, JSA (Joint Security Area).
Park is the first Korean, and the third Asian Cannes jury president, after Japan’s Tetsurō Furukaki in 1962 and Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai in 2006.
The festival noted that his presidency also symbolized its deep attachment to Korean cinema, citing the country’s first Cannes prizewinner as Chi-hwa-seon (Strokes of Fire) for which Im Kwon-taek won best Best Director in 2002, as well Bong Joon-ho with Korea‘s first Palme d’Or for Parasite.
Other Korean Cannes-selected titles have included Hong Sang-soo’s Tale of Cinema (2005), Kim Ki-duk’s Breath (2007), and Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry (2010), all of which premiered in Un Certain Regard.
Korean cinema also has a strong Midnight Screenings trackrecord thanks to Kim Jee-woon’ A Bittersweet Life (2005), Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016), Byun Sung-hyun’s The Merciless (2017) and Lee Won-tae’s The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil (2019).
The country’s acting talent has also made its mark with Jeon Do-yeon winning Best Actress in Secret Sunshine in 2007, and Song Kang-ho, Best Actor for Broker in 2022.
The festival said the Official Selection of the 79th edition will be unveiled mid-April without specifying a date.