This year, Spike Lee will become the first black person in the Cannes Film Festival’s seventy-three-year history to serve as jury president, succeeding Alejandro G. Iñárritu, whose 2019 jury of artists awarded Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) the Palme d’Or, according to NBC News. The sixty-two-year-old filmmaker’s feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), won the Prix de la Jeunesse in the Director’s Fortnight at that year’s Cannes, and his most recent offering, BlacKkKlansman (2018), took home the Cannes Grand Prix. The festival will take place May 12 through the 23, and the rest of Lee’s jury will be announced in mid-April.
