Cannes: Alice Rohrwacher to Lead Golden Camera Jury

Italian director and screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher (La Chimera, Heavenly Body) has been chosen to chair the jury of the Caméra d’or, the Golden Camera jury, in Cannes. This award honors the best first feature film presented in the Official Selection at the Critics’ Week or the Directors’ Fortnight.

Rohrwacher, “whose delicate work blossomed in Cannes,” as organizers noted Friday, will recognize a filmmaker’s debut at the closing ceremony of the 78th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday, May 24.

Last year, the award went to Halfdan Ullmann Tondel for Armand, which premiered in the Cannes festival’s Un Certain Regard section.

“First times are always important and they stay with us for the rest of our lives,” said Rohrwacher. “Like entering an unfamiliar room, approaching one’s beloved for a first kiss, or landing on a foreign shore. There’s something golden that haloes these moments in our memory. Is that why the most prestigious award for first films is called Caméra d’or?”

In her first feature, Heavenly Body (Corpo Celeste), presented at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 2011, Rohrwacher “explored a rapport with the world made of discoveries and beginnings through the portrait of a 13-year-old girl,” Cannes organizers said. “Her second feature, The Wonders (Le meraviglie), was selected to compete at the 2014 Festival de Cannes and won the Grand Prix. This personal tale evokes the daily lives of young sisters on an isolated farm, and modern society catching up with them with the filming of a reality show.”

Her Happy as Lazzaro (Lazzaro felice), about a man suddenly freed from a landowner who kept peasants in serfdom, screened in the Cannes competition in 2018 and was the co-winner of the best screenplay honor.

French star and Oscar winner Juliette Binoche will head up the 2025 Cannes jury, which is picking the Palme winners, as president.

This year’s Cannes festival runs May 13-24.