Nice move for the Cannes Festival and auteur cinema. While the event and this part of the 7th art industry always have a crucial issue of international media coverage to give maximum chances to the selection of films for their theatrical career, the fortnight is a double blow. Not only, by recruiting the director of “Barbie”, Greta Gerwig, as president of the upcoming 77th edition, she is putting an American personality at the head of the festival, but she is also recruiting the artist who best bridges the gap between auteur cinema and commercial cinema.

As Marie-Ange Luciani, the producer of “Anatomy of a Fall” (the 2022 Palme d’Or) said at the Médias en Seine Festival on November 22, Greta Gerwig really comes from auteur cinema. But with “Barbie,” she became the first director to pass the billion-dollar mark at the international box office.

Youth

Released in the summer, the film grossed more than $1.44 billion worldwide. In addition, with a work that does not mechanically reproduce the basic formulas of commercial cinema. The icing on the cake, her presence will give a breath of youth to the Croisette: Cannes has not had such a young president since Sophia Loren and her 31 years… in 1966.

The 40-year-old director, also actress and screenwriter, will succeed Swedish director Ruben Östlund from May 14 to 25. She is “the first American filmmaker to take on” this role, said the festival. She is also the first female director since actress Cate Blanchett in 2018 to access this prestigious position, where men remain over-represented with notable exceptions, such as Jane Campion or Isabelle Huppert.

Price season

“I deeply love films,” said the American director in a festival press release. I like doing them, I like going to see them, I like talking regarding them for hours. As a film buff, Cannes has always been for me the pinnacle of what the universal language of films can represent. »

By announcing in December that it was hiring a very prominent female director, the largest film festival in the world pulled the rug out from under one of its juniors, the Berlinale, which takes place in February. The German festival has just announced on Monday its president of the jury, also aged 40, the Mexican-Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o, the first black person to occupy this position.

The Cannes buzz starts very early, even before the start of the Oscar race, postponed to March 10 following six months of historic strike which paralyzed Hollywood. An awards season for which Greta Gerwig is among the favorites: “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, is in pole position in the race for the Golden Globes, with nominations in nine categories.

Links with American industry

By naming Greta Gerwig, the festival also highlights the persistence of its links with the powerful American industry. The appointment last year as president of Iris Knobloch, from Warner, reinforced this honeymoon between Hollywood and the Croisette.

Greta Gerwig made herself known as the “muse of independent American cinema” with films like “Baghead” by the Duplass brothers or “Damsels in Distress” by Whit Stillman. She directed “Lady Bird” (2017), a comedy regarding adolescence which put her in the running for the Oscar with Saoirse Ronan. She reunites with this actress, accompanied by Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Laura Dern for her modernized and feminist adaptation of a classic of American literature, “The Daughters of Doctor March” (2020).

The one who is preparing an adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia” for Netflix has also played in more than twenty films, including the black and white comedy “Frances Ha”, co-written with her companion, director Noah Baumbach, or in the latter’s film, “White Noise”, alongside Adam Driver.