Spike Lee Becomes First Jury President to Feature on Cannes Film Festival Poster

In a first ever, a jury president features on the Cannes Film Festival poster, which has always been treasured as an invaluable collector’s item. American producer-director-actor, Spike Lee, who is to chair the main international jury, can be seen with Cannes’ all too familiar palm trees in the background.

No other jury president has ever been honoured this way; the closest we got was Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love, an iconic 2006 movie that was seen in the poster.

Lee was to have served as president last year, but the Festival had to be cancelled because of the Coronavirus pandemic. This year, the Festival date has been changed from mid-May to early July – 6 to 17.

One more feather on Lee’s cap. He is the first Black president. He has a long association with Cannes — almost 30 years. His She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989) and BlacKKKlansman (2018), have premiered at the Festival, which this year comes with the tagline “Festival under the Sun”.

In a note, the Festival has listed the reasons for having Lee as their poster hero.

“For the immense impatience to finally find ourselves again in the Cannes setting: the seaside ,the palm trees and the silver screen, just like a blank page, that will welcome the films of the Official Selection…

“For that curious look he is going to put on the work of his fellow filmmakers who bring us news of the World – of theirs and surely a little bit of ours too…

“For this personal view that he has shared with us since his very first feature: shot in black and white in the heat of summer 1985, he was already shaking up cinema by imposing, even back then, his ground-breaking style, imbedded in urban and pop culture…

“For this tender take he embodies as Mars Blackmon, the B-Boy in She’s Gotta Have It – a stereotypical representation of the Afro-American community that the film blows apart…

“For his mischievous eye which, despite constantly questioning and incessantly rebelling for nearly four decades, never neglects entertainment…

“… Spike Lee, citizen of the ‘People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York’, is on the poster of this collector’s edition. Of course!”

(Movie critic and author Gautaman Bhaskaran has covered the Cannes Film Festival close to 30 years)

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