Charlotte Gainsbourg, President of the Jury

« I have been part of the game for 38 years and yet I am still so … upset, upset, aston­ished, shocked, scared, ter­ri­fied, amused, moved … cin­e­ma has indeed a mag­ic that no one can ful­ly explain »
Char­lotte Gainsbourg

If audac­i­ty could come to life on screen, it would sure­ly take the form of Char­lotte Gains­bourg. An actress of risk, of shame­less del­i­ca­cy, Char­lotte Gains­bourg has built her craft on flaws and authen­tic­i­ty. Char­lotte Gains­bourg throws her­self into films with a giant leap into the void, embrac­ing risk to the fullest. Claude Miller, Lars von Tri­er, Riad Sat­touf and Gas­par Noé have under­stood this per­fect­ly, offer­ing her dan­ger­ous roles in which she ser­vices the film with­out a net and with­out a filter.

Char­lotte Gains­bourg is also, of course, a voice, a voice that whis­pers, but above all, a voice that dares and chal­lenges: Jacques Doil­lon, Bertrand Bli­er, Yvan Attal, Benoît Jacquot and count­less oth­ers have dis­cerned the trou­bling pow­er of her rhythm and sin­gu­lar musi­cal­i­ty. Hid­den behind her melan­cholic fragili­ty is a lioness of cin­e­ma: each role is like a water­fall in which she puts her entire self with a kind of brazen shy­ness. Oth­er direc­tors have sought out her dark and bewitch­ing side, like Ale­jan­dro González Iñár­ritu, Olivi­er Nakache and Éric Toledano, Wim Wen­ders and Arnaud Desplechin; oth­ers see dan­ger, like David Bay­ley, Eric Rochant and Fran­co Zef­firelli; and it is clear­ly her love for Bil­ly Wilder that led her to work with Michel Blanc, Danièle Thomp­son and tack­le com­e­dy head-on. What­ev­er the role, she has the gift of teem­ing with grace, that waver­ing of the soul which all great film­mak­ers seek.

Timid, she’s unin­tim­i­dat­ed by scan­dal. Pop­u­lar, she explores the fringes. Instinc­tu­al, she admires mas­tery. Whether in Eng­lish or in French, fun­ny or melan­choly, actor and musi­cian, she cul­ti­vates her ambi­gu­i­ties and her paradoxes.

To bring wide­spread atten­tion to many titles in this excep­tion­al year, we need­ed this actress of inter­na­tion­al stature, and as of now direc­tor, this cin­e­mat­ic adven­turess, and we are grate­ful she accept­ed the mis­sion of Jury Pres­i­dent with full enthusiasm.

Pho­to © Col­lier Schorr

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