Greta Gerwig, the director of “Barbie”, named president of the 77th edition

The one who is also a screenwriter and actress succeeds the Swedish director Ruben Östlund. Greta Gerwig has signed the biggest cinema success of the year 2023 with her adaptation of the adventures of the Mattel doll.

Pink carpet on the Croisette. Greta Gerwig, the American director of barbie, the biggest hit in theaters in 2023 with more than 1.44 billion dollars (1.32 billion euros) collected worldwide, has been named president of the 77th edition of the Cannes festival, announced the organization Thursday December 14. The 40-year-old director, also an actress and screenwriter, will succeed the Swede Ruben Östlund from May 14 to 25, whose jury awarded this year’s Palme d’Or to Anatomy of a fall.

She is “the first American filmmaker to endorse” this role, underlined the festival. She is also the first woman to access this prestigious position since actress Cate Blanchett in 2018, a position where men remain over-represented with notable exceptions, such as Jane Campion or Isabelle Huppert. “I deeply love films, I love making them, I love going to see them, I love talking about them for hours. As a film buff, Cannes has always been for me the pinnacle of what the universal language of films can represent”she said.

Consecration with the Mattel doll

With Barbie, Greta Gerwig became the first director to make a feature film that grossed more than a billion dollars. Before setting foot on the Cannes steps, she could triumph during the awards season which has begun in the United States since the adaptation of the adventures of the Mattel doll, with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, is among the favorites, notably at the Golden Globes with nine nominations.

Beyond this comedy with a feminist message, the screenplay of which she co-wrote with her companion, the director and screenwriter Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig has become known as “the muse of independent American cinema”, recalls the festival. She became known with Frances Ha (2012), autobiographical comedy-drama, in which she stars, which follows a New Yorker wanting to become a dancer. She then realized Lady Bird (2017), a comedy about adolescence which put her in the running for the Oscar with Saoirse Ronan. She reunites with the actress, accompanied by Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Laura Dern for her modernized and feminist adaptation of a classic of American literature, Doctor March’s Daughters (2020).

“This choice is obvious as Greta Gerwig boldly embodies the renewal of world cinema”declared the president of the festival Iris Knobloch and its general delegate Thierry Frémaux. “Beyond the 7th art, she also appears as the representative of an era which abolishes borders and mixes genres to make intelligence and humanism triumph”.