South Korean director Park Chan-wook will be the jury president for the 79th Cannes International Film Festival, Cannes announced Thursday.
The acclaimed filmmaker behind Oldboy, The Handmaiden and No Other Choice will head up the international jury that will select the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or. The 2026 Cannes Film Festival runs May 12 – 23. He will be the first Korean head of the Cannes jury.
“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,” Cannes festival president Iris Knobloch and director Thierry Frémaux said in a 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.”
Park Chan-wook first attracted international attention with his third feature, Joint Security Area, which screened in Berlin in 2001, but his breakthrough came three years later with the world premiere of Oldboy in Cannes. The groundbreaking revenge thriller won the Grand Jury Prize (there was speculation that jury president Quentin Tarantino wanted to give it the Palme).
Park returned to the Croisette multiple times since, rarely leaving empty-handed. His vampire drama Thirst won Cannes’ jury prize in 2009, the period drama The Handmaiden (2016) won the Vulcan Prize for its production design, and his Hitchcockian thriller Decision to Leave took best director in 2022.
“His presence at the Palais des Festivals testifies to the mutual loyalty that exists between Park Chan-wook and the Festival de Cannes,” the festival said in a statement. “He is often compared to film-makers such as Tarantino, De Palma, and Fincher for artistry in composing images whose formal beauty is matched only by their moral rigor. He also cites Kurosawa, Bergman, Visconti, and Hitchcock as models.”
Park is also a regular in Venice, where Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, and No Other Choice premiered. No Other Choice made the shortlist for this year’s Academy Awards in the best international feature category but was not among the final five nominees.
Cannes said Park Chan-wook’s presidency symbolizes “the festival’s early and deep attachment to Korean cinema, whose creativity has been revealed by the Official Selection. Korea is a great film-making country whose treasures are being restored year after year; it has shown that it can produce major contemporary works that attract millions of theatergoers in a space that celebrates its film-makers.”
In a statement following the announcement of his presidency, Park said he was looking forward to spending two weeks watching and debating movies in Cannes.
“The theater is dark so that we may see the light of cinema,” his statement reads. “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. 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. There is no doubt that hearts will be beating intensely on May 12.”
The line-up for the 79th Cannes International Film Festival will be announced in mid-April.
