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Mexico’s Inarritu to head Cannes film festival jury
PARIS, Feb 27, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The five-time Oscar-winning Mexican
director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is to head the jury at this year’s
Cannes film festival, the organisers said Wednesday.
The 55-year-old is one of the “three amigos” of Mexican filmmakers who
have dominated the Academy Awards in recent years alongside Alfonso Cuaron,
the best director winner this year with “Roma” and last year’s victor
Guillermo del Toro for “The Shape of Water”.
He is also one of only three filmmakers ever to have won the Oscar for
best director back-to-back — for “Birdman” in 2015 and “The Revenant” a year
later.
“Not only is he a daring filmmaker full of surprises, Alejandro is also a
man of conviction, an artist of his time,” Cannes director Thierry Fremaux
said.
Inarritu made his big breakthrough at Cannes in 2000 with his breathtaking
debut, “Amores Perros”, a gritty overlapping panorama of Mexico City that
introduced the world to the actor Gael Garcia Bernal.
It won the sidebar Critics’ Week prize and was later pipped for the best
foreign language Oscar by “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”.
Inarritu later won best director at Cannes — the world’s biggest film
festival — for “Babel”, his 2006 epic told in five different languages over
three continents.
– ‘Passion and devotion’ –
Having been the first Mexican director ever to be nominated for an Oscar,
he is now the first to head the jury at Cannes, which sees itself as the
“Olympics of cinema”, with movies from every corner of the globe.
Inarritu, who rarely sits on festival juries, said he would apply himself
to the task with “passion and devotion”.
“Cinema runs through the veins of the planet and this festival has been
its heart,” he added.
Last year Australian actress Cate Blanchett presided over the jury, which
gave the top Palme d’Or prize to Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters”.
She also led red carpet protests to demand an equal place for women in
Hollywood.
Fremaux said the festival was “particularly proud” to have made space for
Inarritu’s 2017 virtual reality installation “Carne y Arena” in its official
selection.
The VR show allowed people to put themselves in migrants’ shoes and
“addressed the question with great strength and humanity”, Fremaux added.
Unlike Cuaron, whose Oscar-winning masterpiece “Roma” was backed by
Netflix, Inarritu has never made a film with the streaming giant.
Cannes and Netflix got into a bitter spat last year after the US giant
boycotted the festival in protest at the festival’s insistence that films in
competition must follow French rules on streaming.
Under a French law to protect cinemas, streamers must wait 36 months after
a film’s cinematic release before they put it online.
Consequently “Roma” and several other Netflix films have not made it to
general release on the big screen there.
However, both sides have since walked back from the clash, with Netflix
boss Reed Hastings admitting that they may have gone too far.
“Sometimes we make mistakes. We got into a bigger situation with Cannes
than we meant to,” he said.
The Cannes film festival will run from May 14 to 25.
BSS/AFP/MR/1106 hrs