The 79th Festival de Cannes opens in six days, on May 12, with Pierre Salvadori's La Vénus électrique — released in English as The Electric Kiss — premiering at the Grand Théâtre Lumière after an opening ceremony hosted by Eye Haïdara. [1] The film, a 1928-set burlesque romantic comedy, will screen simultaneously in cinemas across France via the Fédération Nationale des Cinémas Français. The festival closes May 23. The paper's May 5 advance noted the opener and the honorary Palme slate; six days out, the architecture has filled in around them.
Park Chan-wook chairs the Feature Films jury. The South Korean director — who won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2009 for Thirst and Best Director in 2022 for Decision to Leave — is the first Korean to preside over the main competition jury in the festival's 79-year history. [2] Only one other Asian filmmaker, Wong Kar-wai, has held the role before, twenty years ago.
On May 4 the festival completed the jury around him: American actress Demi Moore, Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga, Belgian director Laura Wandel, Chinese director Chloé Zhao, Chilean director Diego Céspedes, Ivorian-American actor Isaach De Bankolé, Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, and Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård. [3] Read against the year's lineup — dominated by European auteurs, with Ira Sachs as the lone American director in competition before James Gray's Paper Tiger contractual issues resolved — the editorial register is unmistakable.
What this jury and this opening film share is a refusal of American studio gravity. The 2025 Palme went to Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident — Iranian, dissident, presented by Juliette Binoche. [2] Park Chan-wook's filmography — Oldboy, The Handmaiden, Decision to Leave — is the architect's signature on Korean revenge cinema. Salvadori's opener is not a marquee film; it is a French festival's affirmation that the world's most prestigious cinema event is under no obligation to serve as a launchpad for the studio summer.
Cannes general delegate Thierry Frémaux made the framing explicit in an April 9 press conference. Of the 2,541 feature films submitted from 141 countries, the studios chose to be largely absent. "Studios are producing fewer blockbusters and fewer auteur films than in the past," Frémaux told reporters, before noting the festival "depends on nothing other than the films themselves." On April 9 the lineup unveiled 22 films in competition. Honorary Palmes go to Barbra Streisand and Peter Jackson — the latter receiving his on the festival's "Rendezvous" series.
The Park Chan-wook chairmanship lands at a particular moment for Korean cinema. Bong Joon Ho's Parasite won the Palme in 2019; the country has won Best International Feature, the Grand Prix, the Jury Prize, and Best Director in seven of the last eleven festivals. Park's appointment closes a circle that began with Oldboy's 2004 Grand Prix.
Demi Moore's presence on the jury carries its own load. Coralie Fargeat's The Substance won Best Screenplay at the 2024 festival, earning Moore her first Oscar nomination — a Cannes-launched career resurgence that makes her selection a thank-you the festival is permitted to extend. Stellan Skarsgård returns one year after Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value won the 2025 Grand Prix. Ruth Negga and Isaach De Bankolé are Cannes regulars; Chloé Zhao, Wandel and Céspedes are auteur picks.
The opening night of a festival is not a movie. It is a sentence the festival writes about itself. Cannes's sentence on May 12 will be: a French rom-com about a 1928 Parisian magnetic kiss, in a hall where the world will then watch a Korean revenge-cinema architect hand someone the Palme d'Or. American studios, by their own choice, will be elsewhere.
-- CAMILLE BEAUMONT, Los Angeles