Canadian actor and filmmaker Xavier Dolan will be joined on this year’s Un Certain Regard Jury by French-Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir, German-Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps, and American film critic and writer Todd McCarthy.
The jury will be in charge of awarding prizes for the Un Certain Regard sidebar. This year, 18 films have been selected, including eight first features. The 2023 Un Certain Regard top prize went to director Molly Manning Walker’s debut feature How to Have Sex. When the light breaks by Rúnar Rúnarsson will open the Un Certain Regard section on May 15.
A self-taught filmmaker, Dolan made his feature directorial debut at 19 with I Killed My Mother, an adaptation of his own short story, which was chosen to represent Canada at the Academy Awards. He followed up that film with the 2010 romantic drama Heartbeats, which brought him into the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes at the age of 21. Two years after that, he returned with Laurence Anyways, which won Suzanne Clément the award for Best Actress. After taking his psychological thriller Tom at the Farm to Venice, Dolan returned to Cannes in 2014 with Mommy, his first film in Competition, which tied for the Jury Prize with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language.
Doucouré is best known for Cuties, her first feature film, which won the Best Director Award at Sundance and a Special Mention from the International Generation Jury in Berlin. El Moudir directed The Mother of all Lies, which premiered at the 2023 Festival de Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard Directing Prize. Krieps broke out in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. In 2021, she had two films at Cannes, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island in Competition and Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight. The following year, she returned with two young German and Austrian directors in the Un Certain Regard section: Emily Atef’s More than Ever and Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, which won her the Un Certain Regard Jury’s Best Actress Award in 2022. She will soon be seen in Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt and Hot Milk by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. McCarthy is a critic, writer, and filmmaker. Among his books are the definitive biography “Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood”, “Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System” and “Fast Women” about female race car drivers. He won an Emmy Award for his documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of a Hollywood Genius.
Cannes Film Festival runs May 14-25.
