French filmmaker and screenwriter Claire Denis will be chair of the Short Film and Cinéfondation jury of the 72nd Festival de Cannes.

Denis follows Abderrahmane Sissako, Naomi Kawase, Cristian Mungiu and Bertrand Bonello. On May 23rd, she and her jury will award three prizes on behalf of the Cinéfondation to the seventeen student films that are in the running this year. On May 25th, the festival’s closing day, she’ll award the Short Film Palme d’or at the Closing Ceremony.

A filmmaker from France and of France, Denis has penned a directed a number of films.  Her 2013 film “Bastards,” with a spellbinding soundtrack composed by Tindersticks, was shown in the Un Certain Regard section in 2013 at Cannes. That year also she was awarded the Stockholm Lifetime Achievement Award at the Stockholm Film Festival.

Denis announced in 2015 that she was partnering with Zadie Smith for her English-language debut film, “High Life.” The film, released in 2018, was her first English-language feature film, with Robert Pattinson cast as the lead.

Around this time, she also wrote and directed “Let the Sunshine In,” starring Juliette Binoche. It came out in 2017.

In 2005, she was a member of the jury at the 27th Moscow International Film Festival. She was a member of the jury at the Deauville American Film Festival in 2011.

The Cannes Festival will take place May 14-25.

SEE ALSO: Twenty years on, the Cannes Festival’s Gilles Jacob remains an ardent believer in the Cinéfondation’s virtue to discover and foster new filmmaking talent (https://screencomment.com/2019/03/cannesfestival-cinefondation-gillesjacob)