Flanked by Ana Lily Amirpour, Charlotte Le Bon, Karidja Touré and Shlomi Elkabetz, the Hungarian director and screenwriter Ildikó Enyedi will award the Short Film Palme d’or and the 3 La Cinef prizes for student films in the Official Selection.
ILDIKÓ ENYEDI – PRÉSIDENTE
Director & screenwriter
Hungary
ANA LILY AMIRPOUR
Screenwriter & director
Iran/United States
CHARLOTTE LE BON
Actress & director
Canada
KARIDJA TOURÉ
Actress
France
SHLOMI ELKABETZ
Director, screenwriter, actor & producer
Israel
« When, in 1989, in that magical year of change in Europe I arrived in Cannes with my first feature film – with exhibitions banned, a student film banned and many difficulties – it was an unbelievable feeling. Being chosen meant to be understood, to be seen for real, as if this huge, colorful and flamboyant community of brilliant artists and film professionals opened their arms to me, the total beginner, inviting me among them, extending trust where there was just a promise. Till this day I remember every moment of the time spent in Cannes. I am sure that those young filmmakers who present their short films in this year’s festival feel the same positive shock. I root for them, I hope that this recognition will boost their confidence to continue, to be bold and humble, not to lose focus, not to be starstruck or stunned – I root for them to deal with this recognition in a mature and wise way. Well, in a nutshell or rather in short…I root for them! »
ILDIKÓ ENYEDI
PRESIDENT OF THE SHORT FILM AND LA CINEF JURY
Amajor figure in contemporary Hungarian cinema, Ildikó Enyedi has always sought to think about cinema and question its practice. From the beginning of her career at the end of the 1970s, she was involved in contemporary and conceptual art circles. In 1984, Ildikó Enyedi made her first short films, setting the stage for her future work on the boundaries between dream and reality and the interpenetration between cinema and the real world. In Flirt: Hipnózis, she filmed herself during a hypnosis session, while The Mole describes an entirely projected world, recalling Plato’s allegory of the cave.
Her career as a feature film director began successfully at the Festival de Cannes in 1989, where My 20th Century, selected for Un Certain Regard, won the Caméra d’or. It encompasses all the epistemological effervescence in which yesterday’s cinema was born and today’s cinema was forged. The figure of Edison, who launched society in the race for scientific evolution, the technical advances that have changed the face of the class struggle, the new means of locomotion and communication that redefine the space-time boundaries of a world undergoing radical transformation are all explored in this black and white film.
Her subsequent films, whether they be feature films, shorts or a series —Ildikó Enyedi directed the Hungarian adaptation of BeTipul from 2012 to 2017 (Terápia) —, whether they depict love stories (Tamas and Juli, First Love) or police dramas (The Magic Hunter, Simon Le Mage), all dig into the furrow of feelings as mediums between the visible and the invisible, between the palpable and the impalpable.
Her elaborate aesthetics supporting intimate scenarios is the spice of her distinctive filmography: On Body and Soul, Golden Bear at the Berlinale 2017, The Story of My Wife, in Competition at the Festival de Cannes 2021.
With her world-renowned films, Ildikó Enyedi weaves an impressive body of work of subtlety and grace, where rarity engenders precision, where the act of filming measures a way of conceiving cinema.
JURY MEMBERS OF THE SHORT FILM AND LA CINEF
ANA LILY AMIRPOUR
Screenwriter & director
Iran/United States
Iranian-American director, screenwriter, producer, Ana Lily Amirpour made her first film at 12. She has a varied background in the arts, including painting and sculpting, and was bass player and front-woman of an art-rock band before moving to Los Angeles. Her visually dynamic and color-imbued body of work embodies the mantra to make the weird real. Her debut feature film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) was critically acclaimed at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2016, The Bad Batch won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon debuted at Venice in 2021. Recently she helmed The Outside, an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. She has created comic books based on A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and she will publish an intimate book of journal entries collected from her iPhone called Sent From My Slimy Brains.
CHARLOTTE LE BON
Actress & director
Canada
Charlotte Le Bon grew up in Quebec before moving to Paris. She worked as an actress with famous directors such as Michel Gondry and Jalil Lespert. Afterwards, her career took her to the United States to play with Lasse Hallström, Robert Zemeckis and Sean Ellis. As a plastic artist, Charlotte Le Bon explores oddness through painting, drawing and lithographing. Fan of genre movies, she wrote and directed her first short film Judith Hotel, premiered at the Festival de Cannes 2018. Falcon Lake, her first feature film, was selected at the Director’s Fortnight in 2022 and received several awards. The film has also been awarded the same year with the Louis-Delluc Prize for the Best First Film.
KARIDJA TOURÉ
Actress
France
Resourful artist, Karidja Touré provided an unforgettable memory with her first role in the acclaimed Girlhood (2014) by Céline Sciamma, especially with the scene dancing and singing on “Diamonds” by Rihanna as a powerful ode to freedom. For this role, she was nominated as Most Promising Actress at the French Académie des César. In 2017, she plays in The Midwife by Martin Provost, La Colle by Alexandre Castagnetti, Skokan de Petr Václav and Back to Burgundy by Cédric Klapisch, and recently in Ima by Nils Tavernier with the singer Dadju. Also theatre actress, she played in Paris Une mort dans la famille by Alexander Zeldin at the Théâtre de l’Odéon (2021) and in The Just Assassins by Albert Camus directed by Abd Al Malik (2019) at the Châtelet in Paris and lately in Geneva, Switzerland (2023).
SHLOMI ELKABETZ
Director, screenwriter, actor & producer
Israel
Shlomi Elkabetz rose to fame with the trilogy about the place of women in the Israeli society with To Take a Wife, Shiva and The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, co-written with his sister Ronit Elkabetz. With Black Notebooks, selected at the Festival de Cannes (2021), he went on differently this intimate and artistic conversation with his sister, deceased in 2016, through a two-films portait where fiction and documentary combine to deliver a reflection on life and death. Versatile performer, he stared in the HBO TV series Our Boys (2019) ; produced several films among them In Between (2016) by Maysaloun Hamoud, her TV series Nafas (2020) and recently Ead by Yosef Abu Magiam, Cause You’re Ugly by Sharon Angelheart, I Cant Say No to Myself by Hadas Ben Aroya and Golden Heart by Efrat Corem. He’s currently working on his upcoming film as director Maria.