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. “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-ever female American director to lead Cannes jury. She’s certainly qualified for the gig, having written and directed two Oscar-nominated films—Ladybird and Little Women—and co-written and directed the biggest movie of 2023, Barbie. At 40 years old, she’s also the second-youngest person to head the Cannes Film Festival, after Oscar winner Sophia Loren, who led the jury when she was 31 in 1966. Gerwig follows in the footsteps of two-time Palme D’or winner and Triangle of Sadness director Ruben Ostlund, who headed the jury this past year, when Justine Triet‘s Anatomy of a Fall won the top prize.
Thierry Frémaux, Cannes Film Festival’s artistic director, and Iris Knobloch, its president, told the New York Times that Gerwig was “the obvious choice” to lead the festival 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 will be announced in April.
