(Paris) The Cannes Film Festival elected a new president on Wednesday, a lawyer with an international profile and a long career in cinema, Iris Knobloch, to succeed Frenchman Pierre Lescure, 76, in office since 2014 in July.
Posted at 4:16 p.m.
The mandate of the one who will be the first woman to preside over this festival, for a period of three years, will cover the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions, specifies a press release. She was elected by the board of directors by secret ballot, as provided for in the statutes.
The future president is delighted in the press release to “devote all (her) energy to the influence of this planetary event, a major meeting for the safeguarding of the cultural life of a world which feels, more than ever, the imperative need “.
Mme Knobloch has spent most of her career at Warner, one of the main American studios, where she led the French activities, then in a wider part of Europe, until last summer.
She is a regular at Cannes, where she has accompanied many directors and artists, from Clint Eastwood (Ruthless) to Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), passing by Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh or George Miller, underlines the press release.
She then, last July, participated in the creation and took the helm of I2PO, a financial vehicle created by the Pinault family and the French investment banker Matthieu Pigasse, to raise funds and make investments in the sectors of entertainment and recreation.
These activities had made certain representatives of French cinema, who have seats alongside the public authorities on the festival’s board of directors, fear a potential conflict of interest. They had deplored the lack of “transparency” in the process of choosing the candidate, in a letter to the current president consulted by AFP.
After this election, attention is now focused on the official selection of the 75and edition of the festival, which must be announced on April 14 by the general delegate, Thierry Frémaux.
For the moment, very little information has filtered on this edition which returns to its usual period, in May (from 17 to 28 this year). Only the projection of Top Gun Maverick with Tom Cruise has been confirmed, but the composition of the jury has not yet been revealed.