Ruben Östlund, President of the Jury of the 76th Festival de Cannes

"I am happy, proud, and humbled to be trusted with the honor of Jury president for this year's Competition at the Festival de Cannes Nowhere in the film world is the anticipation as strong as when the curtain rises on the films in Competition at the festival. Being part of it with the Cannes audience of connoisseurs is a privilege. I am sincere when I say cinema culture is in its most important period ever. The cinema has a unique aspect - There, we watch together, and it demands more of what is shown and increases the intensity of the experience. It makes us reflect differently than when we dopamine scroll in front of the individual screens", declared the future President.

Ruben Östlund

With a track record of only six features, the filmmaker was already selected twice at Un Certain Regard, where he was awarded the Jury Prize in 2014, before later entering the Competition. No sooner does he appears there that the Palme d'Or is granted to him twice, first for The Square at the 70th Festival de Cannes and then for his next film acclaimed last year, Triangle of Sadness.

After studying cinema in Gothenburg, he directed his first feature film, The Guitar Mongoloid, in 2004. His next short film, Autobiographical Scene Number 6882, gathers all the ingredients of his future work, affirmed in Involuntary, a feature film selected at Un Certain Regard in 2008. On the edge of the documentary genre, the film describes the intersecting destinies of outcasts in a fictional city that closely resembles Gothenburg. Humor as a tool of sociological description is already apparent. Östlund positions the camera at a relevant distance to better observe human behavior: minor weaknesses and major flaws caused by group dynamics are then dissected to the point of discomfort. Two years later, Incident by a Bank won the Golden Bear for best short film at the 60th Berlinale - it examines the reactions of passers-by to a bank robbery.

Fifty years after fellow citizen Ingrid Bergman, Swedish director Ruben Östlund, a two-time winner of the Palme d'Or, will preside over the Jury of the 76th edition of the Festival de Cannes to be held from May 16 to 27.

His third feature film, Play, presented at La Quinzaine des Réalisateurs in Cannes in 2011, describes harassment between youth gangs. When it was released in Sweden, it gave rise to a significant debate across Swedish society.

In Force Majeure, screened at Un Certain Regard in 2014, the situation takes on the aspect of an avalanche where a father prefers to take cover rather than save his wife and children: how can he accept the aftermath in bad faith and in fear of losing face? Such is the issue that the director examines with ferocious acidity.

Ruben Östlund repeatedly explores a provocative dialectic that has become his signature: an initial situation sets the stage for a sociological examination where the baser instincts of our humanity are painstakingly and uncompromisingly examined with sarcastic humor.

In 2017, in The Square, he told the fictional story of an artistic experiment he conducted in his native country. The film brilliantly addresses the boundaries of public space, art, and the animal aspects within ourselves.

Finally, in 2022, Triangle of Sadness chronicles a cruise ship caught in a storm that reshuffles the cards of class struggle in Western societies in a nauseating hullabaloo.

By inviting Ruben Östlund to preside over the Jury, the Festival de Cannes wishes to pay tribute to uncompromising and forthright films that constantly demand that viewers challenge themselves and that art continue to invent itself.

Ruben Östlund has therefore become the third two-time winner of the Palme d'Or to be the President of the Jury, following Francis Ford Coppola and Emir Kusturica, and the very first to take on this role the year after his acclaim in Cannes.

"As President, concludes Ruben Östlund, I will remind my jury colleagues about the cinema's social function. A good movie relates to the collective experience, stimulates us to think, and makes us want to discuss what we have seen - So let's watch it together! "