Park Chan-wook, President of the Jury of the 79th Festival de Cannes

"본능적, 파격적, 바로크적...시나리오, 스타일과 도덕성 모두 대담한 감독"

 

Park Chan-wook ©Lee Seung-hee

 

'칸느 박'이란 별명으로 불리우던 박찬욱(Park Chan-wook, 63) 감독이 제 79회 칸 영화제(5/12-23) 심사위원장(présidents du jury)으로 위촉됐다. 한인 영화인이 칸 영화제 심사위원장을 맡는 것은 처음이며, 아시안 영화인으로선 2006년 왕가위(Wong Kar-wai) 감독에 이어 두번째다. 칸 영화제 심사위원은 박찬욱(2017)을 비롯, 신상옥 감독(1994), 이창동 감독(2009), 배우 전도연(2014), 배우 송강호(2021), 홍상수 감독(2025)이 맡았었다. 박찬욱 감독은 지난해 심사위원장이었던 프랑스 여배우 줄리엣 비노쉬의 뒤를 이어 경쟁 부문 심사를 지휘하게 된다.  

 

칸 영화제 이리스 노블로흐 회장과 티에리 프레모 디렉터는 보도자료를 통해 "박찬욱의 독창성, 시각적 기량, 그리고 기묘한 운명을 지닌 남녀의 다양한 충동을 포착하는 성향은 현대영화에 진정으로 기억에 남을 만한 순간들을 선사해왔다"며, "그의 방대한 재능과 더 나아가 우리시대의 질문을 깊이 탐구하는 한국영화를 기념하게 되어 기쁘다"고 밝혔다. 

 

박찬욱 감독은 2004년 '올드보이(Oldboy)'로 심사위원대상, 2009년 '박쥐(Thirst)'로 심사위원상, 2022년 '헤어질 결심(Decision to Leave)'으로 감독상을 수상하며 세계적인 거장의 반열에 올랐다. 칸영화제 측은 "본능적이며, 파격적이며, 바로크적인 박찬욱의 영화는 시나리오, 스타일과 도덕성에 이르기까지 모든 면에서 대담하다"면서 상징적인 사회적 메시지나 관객으로부터 결코 벗어나지 않는다. 그는 관객을 어둡고, 불안한 세계로 몰아넣고, 때로는 공포스러우며, 때로는 짜릿하고, 때로는 에로틱한...또는 모든 감정이 뒤섞인 여정을 선사한다"고 평했다.

 

그의 작품은 형식적인 미학과 도덕적인 엄격함이 조화를 이루는 영상미로 퀜틴 타란티노, 브라이언 드 팔마, 데이빗 핀처 등과 비교되곤 한다. 박 감독은 구로사와 아키라, 잉그마르 베르히만, 루키노 비스콘티, 알프레드 히치코크를  자신의 롤 모델로 꼽기도 했다.

 

칸영화제는 또한, 한국영화의 우수성을 언급했다. 이번 박찬욱 감독의 심사위원장 임명은 칸 영화제가 오랫동안 한국영화에 깊은 애정을 가져왔음을 상징하며, 공식 선정작들을 통해 한국영화의 창의성이 여실히 드러났다고 밝혔다. 한국은 위대한 영화 제작국으로 해마다 그 보물들을 재조명받고 있으며, 칸 영화제의 중심이 되는 작품들을 만들어낼 수 있음을 보여주었다고 강조했다. 

 

21세기 들어 한국영화는 르네상스를 맞았다. 임권택 감독이 2002년 '취화선(Chi-hwa-seon/ Strokes of Fire)'으로 감독상을 수상한 이후 종종 '주목할만한 시선(Un Certain Regard)'에서 상영됐으며, 신세대 감독인 홍상수(극장전/Tale of Cinema), 김기덕(숨결/Breath) 등은 경쟁 부문에 초청됐다. 그리고, 미드나잇 상영화에선 김지원(달콤한 인생/A Bittersweet Life), 연상호(부산행/Train to Busan), 변성현(불한당:나쁜 놈들의 세상/The Merciless), 이원태(악인전/The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil) 등의 작품이 선보였다. 

 

그리고, 이 물결 속에서 2019년 봉준호(Bong Joon-ho) 감독은 한국영화 최초로 황금종려상(Palme d'Or)를 수상했다. 당시 심사위원장은 알레얀드로 곤잘레스 감독이었다. 

 

 

Park Chan-wook, President of the Jury of the 79th Festival de Cannes

 

 

Twelve spectacular feature films have established him as one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary cinema.

 

Internationally acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, South Korean director, screenwriter and producer Park Chan-wook will preside over the Jury for Feature Films in Competition at the 79th Festival de Cannes. This is a first for Korean cinema.

 

On Saturday, May 23, on the stage of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, Park Chan-wook and his jury will award the 2026 Palme d’Or as the successor to last year’s, presented by Juliette Binoche to Iran’s Jafar Panahi for It was Just an Accident.

 

Visceral, subversive and baroque, Park Chan-wook’s films are bold in every way —in script, in style and in morality. Yet the virtuoso director never strays from a symbolic social message or from his audience, whom he immerses in dark, disturbing worlds on journeys that are sometimes terrifying, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes erotic… or all of these together.

 

“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.”

 

For Park Chan-wook, it all began in Cannes with Old Boy, which won the Grand Prix in 2004. Since then, almost all of his films selected for the Competition have earned him awards: Thirst (Jury Prize 2009), The Handmaiden (2016), and Decision to Leave (Best Director 2022), so many films with extraordinary heroines… His presence at the Palais des Festivals testifies to the mutual loyalty that exists between Park Chan-wook and the Festival de Cannes.

 

He is often compared to film-makers such as Tarantino, De Palma, and Fincher for artistry in composing images whose formal beauty is matched only by their moral rigor. He also cites Kurosawa, Bergman, Visconti, and Hitchcock as models.

 

Though he developed a passion for cinema at a very young age and had a brief career as a critic, Park Chan-wook dreamed of becoming a film director after discovering Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock. The English master has permeated his work, down to the composition of certain shots and sets, with a sense of aesthetics tinged with surrealism. Park Chan-wook drew freely on Shadow of a Doubt for his family drama Stoker (2013), his American escapade starring Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska. And Hitchcock’s influence is once again strikingly evident in his Decision to Leave, a seductive and vertiginous thriller in which obsession is taken to the extreme.

 

Obsession is a recurring theme in all his films, right up to his latest, No Other Choice (2025). This jubilant satire with its macabre humor lampoons the deadly quest for success that consumes Korean capitalist society, as well as male vanity, which was already fiercely exposed in his feminist and queer film The Handmaiden. Revenge is also the blood-red thread running through Park Chan-wook’s deeply pictorial filmography. It is the subject of a trilogy that began in 2002 with Sympathy for Mister Vengeance, continued in 2004 with Old Boy, which established him on the international scene, and that was completed in 2005 with Lady Vengeance. In this cinema of excess, treasure hunts and massacres alternate between unease and comedy, heartbreak and the grotesque in an art of crazed but perfectly mastered contrast. The plunge into the depths of a human soul torn between the impulses of love and death remains nonetheless harrowing…

 

The work of Park Chan-wook —whose third film, JSA (Joint Security Area), broke the national box office record in 2000— embodies the DNA of contemporary Korean cinema in every way: free from conventions, audience-oriented, ambitious, deliberately provocative, and sophisticated without being intellectualized.

 

Park Chan-wook’s presidency symbolizes the Festival’s early and deep attachment to Korean cinema, whose creativity has been revealed by the Official Selection. Korea is a great film-making country whose treasures are being restored year after year; it has shown that it can produce major contemporary works that attract millions of theatergoers in a space that celebrates its film-makers.

 

At the turn of the new millennium, a new generation swept onto the Croisette, led by veteran Im Kwon-taek, Cannes’ first Korean winner with the 2002 Best Director award for Chi-hwa-seon (Strokes of Fire). Often selected for Un Certain Regard, the new generation has established a lasting presence in Competition (Hong Sang-soo, Tale of Cinema, 2005; Kim Ki-duk, Breath, 2007; Lee Chang-dong, Poetry, Best Screenplay 2010) and in the Midnight Screenings (Kim Jee-woon, A Bittersweet Life, 2005; Yeon Sang-ho, Train to Busan, 2016; Byun Sung-hyun, The Merciless, 2017; Lee Won-tae, The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil, 2019).

 

As the crowning glory of this wave, Bong Joon-ho won the first Korean Palme d’Or, awarded by the jury chaired by Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2019.

 

Finally, while Korean directors are regularly honored by the Festival de Cannes, their actors are equally celebrated, both on juries and in the awards, as evidenced by Jeon Do-yeon (Best Actress, Secret Sunshine, 2007) and Song Kang-ho (Best Actor, Broker, 2022). The latter has appeared in four films directed by Park Chan-wook.

 

A few months before the 79th Festival, future President Park Chan-wook confided: “The theater is dark so that we may see the light of cinema. We confine ourselves within the theater so that our souls may be liberated through the window of film. To be enclosed in a theater to watch films, and enclosed again to engage in debate with the members of the Jury, this double, voluntary confinement is something I await with great anticipation. In this age of mutual hatred and division, I believe that the simple act of gathering in a theater to watch a single film together, our breaths and heartbeats aligning, is itself a moving and universal expression of solidarity.” 

 

There is no doubt that hearts will be beating intensely on May 12.

 

The 79th Festival de Cannes, from May 12 to May 23, 2026.

 

The Official Selection will be unveiled mid-April 2026.

https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/press/press-releases/park-chan-wook-president-of-the-jury-of-the-79th-festival-de-cannes 

 

 

 

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