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Maggie Gyllenhaal joins Cannes Film Festival jury

Spike Lee serves as president of this year’s jury.

Maggie Gyllenhaal has joined the jury for next month’s Cannes Film Festival.

The Dark Knight actress joins French actor-director Melanie Laurent, French-Senegalese actor-director Mati Diop, Austrian director Jessica Hausner and cult French singer Mylene Farmer on a jury headed up by Spike Lee.

French actor Tahar Rahim, Brazilian helmer Kleber Mendonca Filho, and South Korean actor Song Kang-ho are also on the panel.

The jury is the first to be led by a Black president and has the most female-friendly ratio in history, with five women and three men.

Gyllenhaal has recently moved behind the camera to direct Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Peter Sarsgaard, and Paul Mescal in The Lost Daughter. The psychological drama is based on the novel of the same name by Elena Ferrante.

She and her fellow jurists will judge In Competition films including Sean Penn’s Flag Day, Wes Anderson’s journalistic epic The French Dispatch, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket and the opening film, Leos Carax’s musical Annette, which stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard.

Although the Donnie Darko star and Lee are the most familiar names among the judges, others will be familiar to movie lovers, as Laurent starred in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious B**terds, while Kang-ho played the lead in Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning film Parasite.

Notable films screening out of competition are Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass, Andrea Arnold’s Cow and Todd Haynes’ documentary on The Velvet Underground. Others also showing movies include Charlotte Gainsbourg, Mathieu Almaric, and Tom McCarthy.

The festival will run from 6 to 17 July.

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