Following an Academy snub, Park Chan-wook has landed the biggest chair at Cannes, taking on the festival’s top jury post.

The 79th Cannes Film Festival will be presided over by Park Chan-wook, the celebrated South Korean auteur known for The Vengeance Trilogy and most recently No Other Choice (2025), taking over from French actor Juliette Binoche after her jury’s decision to award Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (2025) with the Palme d’Or last year.

When No Other Choice failed to land a single Oscar nomination, some cinephiles read it as yet another slight in Park’s decades-spanning career, part of what they perceived as an ongoing pattern of neglect by the Academy.

This latest honour paints a different picture: Park remains a filmmaker the industry just cannot ignore, and his films – including his reinventions of the Hitchcockian thriller – are still vital to the development of contemporary cinema.

Park first made waves at Cannes in 2004, presenting Oldboy (2003), which won the Grand Prix. Since then, his work has continued to collect honours at the festival, most notably Decision to Leave (2022), which earned him the Best Director prize.

His name has become a staple on the festival circuit, alongside fellow South Korean auteurs such as Bong Joon-ho and Hong Sang-soo. It certainly looks like Korean cinema has become a key force in today’s film landscape, shaping cinematic possibilities and marking new horizons.

By taking on the role, Park Chan-wook makes history as the first South Korean to lead the Cannes jury. He joins a short list of Asian figures to have held the post, alongside Wong Kar-wai, who presided two decades ago, and Tetsurō Furukaki, who served in 1962.

“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,”

said Festival President Iris Knobloch and Director Thierry Frémaux.

“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 79th edition of the Cannes Film Festival will take place from 12 to 23 May.