This Barbie is going to Cannes. Barbie auteur Greta Gerwig will be heading to the South of France this spring to head the jury of the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
Gerwig said that she was “stunned and thrilled and humbled” to be selected to lead the prestigious film festival panel. “As a cinephile, Cannes has always been the pinnacle of what the universal language of movies can be,” she added in a statement. “I cannot wait to see what journeys are in store for all of us.”
Gerwig will be the first female American director to lead the Cannes jury. She’s certainly qualified for the gig, having written and directed two Oscar-nominated films—Lady Bird and Little Women—and cowritten and directed the biggest movie of 2023, Barbie. At 40 years old, she will also be the second-youngest person to ever chair the Cannes Film Festival jury, after Oscar winner Sophia Loren, who presided over the jury when she was 31 in 1966. Gerwig will follow in the footsteps of two-time Palme d’Or winner and Triangle of Sadness director Ruben Östlund, who headed the jury this past year, when Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won the top prize.
Thierry Frémaux, the Cannes Film Festival’s artistic director, and Iris Knobloch, its president, said in a statement that Gerwig was “an obvious choice” to lead the festival jury next year. Gerwig, they said, “audaciously embodies the renewal of world cinema” and “is also the representative of an era that is breaking down barriers and mixing genres, and thereby elevating the values of intelligence and humanism.”
The 77th Cannes Film Festival will take place from May 14 to May 25. The lineup for next year’s festival is set to be announced in April.