South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook will preside over the jury of the 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. The director, screenwriter and producer succeeds French actress Juliette Binoche.

Park has had a long association with Cannes. He presented his feature debut, Oldboy at the 2004 festival, where it won the Grand Prize. He subsequently returned to competition with films including Thirst, which won the Jury Prize in 2009, The Handmaiden in 2016 and Decision to Leave, which earned him the best director award in 2022.

“Park Chan-wook’s inventiveness, visual mastery, and penchant for capturing the multiple impulses of women and men with strange destinies have given contemporary cinema some truly memorable moments,” festival president Iris Knobloch and director Thierry Frémaux said in a joint statement.

“We are delighted to celebrate his immense talent and, more broadly, the cinema of a country deeply engaged with the questioning of our time,” the statement added.

Park becomes the first South Korean jury president in the festival’s 79-year history. Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai is the only other Asian director to have headed the jury, two decades ago.

“The theater is dark so that we may see the light of cinema. We confine ourselves within the theater so that our souls may be liberated through the window of film. To be enclosed in a theater to watch films, and enclosed again to engage in debate with the members of the jury, this double, voluntary confinement is something I await with great anticipation,” Park said in a statement.

“In this age of mutual hatred and division, I believe that the simple act of gathering in a theater to watch a single film together, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a moving and universal expression of solidarity,” he added.

South Korean cinema has enjoyed a long association with Cannes. In 2002, director Im Kwon-taek won the best director award for Strokes of Fire. In 2019, Bong Joon-ho became the first Korean filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or for Parasite.

Other South Korean directors who have screened films in competition at Cannes include Hong Sang-soo with Tale of Cinema in 2005, Kim Ki-duk with Breath in 2007 and Lee Chang-dong, whose Poetry won best screenplay in 2010.

Kim Jee-woon also screened A Bittersweet Life at Cannes in 2005, Yeon Sang-ho took Train to Busan to the festival in 2016. Other titles include Byun Sung-hyun’s The Merciless in 2017 and Lee Won-tae’s The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil in 2019.