Isabelle Huppert will head up the 2024 Venice Film Festival jury this year. Serving as jury president, Huppert will hand out the Golden Lion and other awards when the festival on the Lido concludes. The dates for this year’s edition are August 28 to September 7.
Huppert has never before served as jury president at Venice, but she did at Cannes in 2009, awarding the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” after deliberations with James Gray, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Asia Argento, Robin Wright, and Lee Chang-dong. Before that she’d served on the jury headed by Dirk Bogarde at Cannes in 1984, which gave the top prize to “Paris, Texas.”
The 71-year-old actress has been a powerhouse force in global cinema for the past 50 years, making her mark in French cinema before quickly appearing in Hollywood productions such as Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.” Over the past decade Huppert’s had a particular renaissance with notable performances in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle,” for which she received her first Academy Award nomination, Mia Hansen-Love’s “Things to Come,” Haneke’s “Happy End” (she recently told IndieWire, “we need his films” referring to Haneke, who hasn’t made a film since) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s “EO.”
Huppert has had a close relationship with the Venice Film Festival in the past, winning the Volpi Cup for Best Actress twice: for 1988’s “Story of Women” and 1995’s “La Ceremonie.” The festival also awarded her a Special Lion for her overall work in 2005, though she’s likely a top contender for the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement these days, considering that recent winners have included Tilda Swinton, Jamie Lee Curtis, Catherine Deneuve, and Tony Leung Chiu-wai.
In 2023, Damien Chazelle was jury president, following Julianne Moore, Bong Joon Ho, Cate Blanchett, and Lucrecia Martel having recently served in the role. Chazelle’s jury awarded the Golden Lion to Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” while other recent Golden Lion winners include “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “Happening,” “Nomadland,” and “Joker.”
As a recent interview with IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio shows, Huppert is as engaged with filmmaking as ever. She talked a bit about what she’s looking for in a collaborative filmmaking experience now: “What I’m looking for is still a dialogue with a director. I still believe in this, and I hope that doesn’t become obsolete, because that’s not what you have when you make a series, where you have different looks. At the end of the day, do you have one look, because you have several directors? I’m not saying it’s against cinema but, certainly, do you have a vision, a very personal vision of the film? You have the vision of a script, of a screenwriter, a series of events, a series of good scenes, but do you have an aesthetic vision? For me, that remains the definition of moviemaking. That’s what I look for, a director.”
