Which films might appeal to the president of the jury at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival?
She moves through cinema like one walks in the night: attentively, in search of truth. Juliette Binoche is not a jury president like any other. Neither a totem nor an arbiter. She is listening itself. Her presence at the head of the Cannes jury in 2025 already sets the tone for this edition: a sensitive, intuitive, and deeply felt presidency. A presidency on a human scale.
In what promises to be a vibrant competition, three very different films already seem to resonate with what Binoche has always championed: a cinema where emotion is a necessity, never an artifice.
Jafar Panahi – A simple accident
It's impossible to imagine Binoche remaining unmoved by a Jafar Panahi film. She knows the price of imposed silence, the kind suffered by gagged artists. The Iranian filmmaker, regularly placed under house arrest or imprisoned, nevertheless continues to produce a fragile and clandestine cinema, made with the urgency of those who have nothing left to lose.
In A simple accidentIt all begins with an ordinary, almost banal event. But in Panahi's world, reality never lasts long: it cracks, collapses, opens onto the abyss. This kind of cinema, without effects, without makeup, is something Binoche has always championed. One can easily imagine her deeply moved by this stark work, taut as a thread.
Joachim Trier – Sentimental value
With Sentimental valueNorwegian director Joachim Trier continues his chronicle of the contemporary soul. After Julie (in 12 chapters)He returns to a rare form of cinema: that of subtle nuances. Here, everything unfolds in silences, glances, and surfacing memories.
The story? After their mother's death, Nora and Agnès see their father, Gustav, reappear in their lives. A once-renowned director, he wants Nora, now an actress, to play the lead role in his next film, but she categorically refuses. What one senses in this work is a profound sensitivity—the kind that Binoche, too, has always brought to the screen. This film could touch her like a whispered secret.
Julia Ducournau – Alpha
Here, cinema takes on a new texture. Julia Ducournau, the shocking winner of the Palme d'Or in 2021 with Titanium, comes back with AlphaAn even more radical film, they say. An organic thriller? A dystopian fable? A bodily nightmare? There's talk of mutations, metamorphoses, and reimagined bodies.
This isn't the kind of film that appeals to everyone. But Binoche, precisely, has never sought consensus. She's worked with Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Leos Carax; she knows the power of cinema that disturbs, that challenges. She could therefore see in Alpha not a provocative object, but a cinematic gesture: strong, risky, vital.
Three filmmakers, three approaches – and the same high standards
Panahi, Trier, Ducournau. Three languages, three rhythms, three worldviews. But a shared idea of cinema: that of an art that dares, that explores, that doesn't cheat. If Juliette Binoche were to award the Palme d'Or to one of them, it would surely be because she would have recognized in it that rare thing: a necessary film.
Presiding over a jury isn't about endorsing the aesthetics of the moment, nor pandering to current trends. It's about selecting what, perhaps, will still resonate ten years from now. And Binoche has never been an actress of the moment. She chooses what endures.
