American screenwriter, director and actress Greta Gerwig will chair the 77th Cannes Film Festival to roll from May 14 to 25 2024. In recent weeks, she has broken every record with Barbie, a fantasy comedy which she helmed from a script she wrote along with her partner Noah Baumbach.
Often considered a heroine of modern times, she has made a mark in movies like Mistress America, Greenberg, Damsels in Distress, Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love and Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. She says: “I love films – I love making them, I love going to them, I love talking about them. As a cinephile, Cannes has always been the pinnacle of what the universal language of movies can be. Being in the place of vulnerability, in a dark theatre filled with strangers, watching a brand-new film is my favourite place to be. I am stunned and thrilled and humbled to be serving as the President of the Cannes Film Festival Jury. I cannot wait to see what journeys are in store for all of us!”.
Born in Sacramento, California, but living in New York for many year, she who dreamed of being a playwright has crafted her own path, with both consistency and a taste for risk, towards the heights of brilliance.
Once an ambassador of independent American cinema, now at the summit of worldwide box-office success, Gerwig manages to combine what was previously judged to be incompatible: delivering arthouse blockbusters, narrowing the gap between art and industry, exploring contemporary issues with deft as well as depth, and declaring her demanding artistic ambition from within an economic model that she embraces in order to put to better use.
Her artistic endeavours have recurrent leitmotifs, such as family upheaval, adolescent rites of passage, fear of loss of social status or the emergence of artistic vocation via characters that are free, sometimes fragile and marginal, but also fierce.
Starting out as an actress, Gerwig transformed into a screenwriter working on a variety of projects. She co-wrote Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008) which she also co-directed, Frances Ha(2012), Mistress America (2015) and of course Barbie with Noah Baumbach, her accomplice in art. This has created fascinating records.
Her very first solo work, Lady Bird (2017) – a striking, tender and melancholic portrait of the torments of adolescence – was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Director.
Then she boldly took hold of the American literature classic from 1868 by Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, again with the intention of taking a fresh look at all of the story’s female protagonists, so as to better examine their emancipation in a world dominated by men.
“This is an obvious choice, since Greta Gerwig so audaciously embodies the renewal of world cinema, for which Cannes is each year both the forerunner and the sounding board”, said Iris Knobloch, Festival President, and Thierry Fremaux, General Delegate. “Beyond the 7th Art, she is also the representative of an era that is breaking down barriers and mixing genres, and thereby elevating the values of intelligence and humanism.”
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