Discover the president of the jury!

There are lead­ing roles that are not for­got­ten. But few of them define their inter­preter to the point of con­fu­sion. Even if it means blur­ring the bound­aries between real­i­ty and imag­i­na­tion, an excep­tion­al pow­er which will stick to the skin of the actor, and make him one of the great­est. Benoît Mag­imel is one of those chil­dren born in the the­ater, who, like Jean-Pierre Léaud, have become cin­e­ma incarnate.

No one has for­got­ten his face as a young lead­ing man, dis­cov­ered in 1988 in the guise of Mau­rice Le Ques­noy-Gro­seille in Éti­enne Chatillez’ LIFE IS A LONG QUIET RIVER, Benoît Mag­imel has always shared the capac­i­ty for adap­ta­tion of his char­ac­ter face to any envi­ron­ment, this agili­ty to move.

Since his debut in front of the cam­era at the age of thir­teen, the self-taught actor has nev­er stopped explor­ing the diverse and var­ied ter­ri­to­ries of French cin­e­ma, prov­ing to any­one who doubts that he can also alter­nate genre films, come­dies, main­stream films and art­house films and that there are only bor­ders that we construct.

Admir­er of Gabin and Ven­tu­ra, he acquired the stature, the nat­u­ral­ness which makes us for­get the tech­nique, the charis­ma, the inten­si­ty and the tal­ent. And like them, he embraces the best of the cin­e­ma of his time.

With more than six­ty films embrac­ing all the diver­si­ty and rich­ness of con­tem­po­rary French cin­e­ma and under the direc­tion of the great­est, from Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Emmanuelle Bercot, Guil­laume Canet, Quentin Dupieux, to Alice Winocour or Emmanuel Finkiel, Benoît Mag­imel has become a pop­u­lar nation­al fig­ure as much as a tal­ent rec­og­nized by his peers, a fast-paced worka­holic, even going so far as to become the only one in the his­to­ry of the sev­enth art to win two con­sec­u­tive César for Best Actor.

And it is undoubt­ed­ly his mas­ter­ful and twi­light per­for­mance in Albert Serra’s PACIFICTION which makes him an actor of genius today: by lit­er­al­ly bring­ing a soul into a body, by invent­ing with a film­mak­er a leg­endary char­ac­ter, he for­ev­er pen­e­trates the imag­i­na­tion of a rein­vent­ed art. Who will pro­voke the admi­ra­tion of one of the great­est Amer­i­can direc­tors: David Fincher.

His role in Trân Anh Hùng’s THE TASTE OF THINGS, which rep­re­sent­ed France at the Oscars, estab­lished him among the Amer­i­can pub­lic as the incar­na­tion of the mar­riage of the sev­enth art and gas­tron­o­my, as a nation­al jewel.

So today, he takes on the role of pres­i­dent, that of the Deauville jury, for a high­ly sym­bol­ic 50^th anniver­sary edi­tion, at the height of his tal­ent and our admiration.