Payal Kapadia named a jury member in this year's Cannes Film Festival

All We Imagine As Light-fame Payal Kapadia will be back at Cannes, this time as a jury member, for the upcoming 78th edition to be held next month.

Headed by French actress Juliette Binoche (Certified Copy, The English Patient), the jury will also comprise actress Halle Berry, actor Jeremy Strong, Italian actor Alba Rohrwacher, French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani, Congolese director-producer Dieudo Hamadi, Korean director and screenwriter Hong Sangsoo, and Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas.

A graduate of Pune's Film and Television Institute of India, Kapadia won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024 for All We Imagine As Light. Kapadia's Cannes journey began in 2017, when she screened her short film Afternoon Clouds at the Cannes La Cinefondation, followed by her non-fiction film A Night of Knowing Nothing, which won the L'il d'Or award for best documentary in 2021.

All We Imagine As Light, Kapadia's debut feature about female bonding and survival, starring Kani Kusruti and Divya Prabha, was the first film from India to participate in the Cannes Competition after a 30-year gap.

This year's Cannes Competition will see 21 films vying for the Palme d'Or, the event's top prize. Last year, it went to Sean Baker's Anora. The announcement of this edition's winners will be made at the gala's closing ceremony on May 24.

Previous Indian-origin jury members at Cannes included Mrinal Sen, Mira Nair, Shekhar Kapur, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Nandita Das, Sharmila Tagore, Vidya Balan, and Deepika Padukone have served on the Cannes jury.

It must be noted that this festival edition will also see Indian cinema making its presence felt in the form of four Marathi-language films —Sthal, Snow Flower, Khalid Ka Shivaji, and Juna Furniture. Out of these, Juna Furniture is part of the special screening category.

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