The Serpent star Tahar Rahim, US actress Maggie Gyllenhaal and Parasite lead Song Kang-ho are part of this year's Cannes Film Festival jury led by director Spike Lee, organisers announced on Thursday.
This year's jury will be made up of mostly women. The festival has faced criticism in recent years for its lack of female representation.
Only one woman has ever won the Palme d'Or in its 73 years – Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993.
This year's jury will wade through 24 entries – only four by women – to decide the winner of the art house world's most coveted film prize.
The nine members include French actor-director Melanie Laurent, best known for her role in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
The jury also features several international filmmakers: Brazilian Kleber Mendonca Filho, who competed at Cannes in 2016 with Aquarius, Austrian Jessica Hausner, who competed with Little Joe in 2019, and French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, whose debut Atlantique won the Grand Prix the same year.
French-Algerian star Rahim made his name with indie favourite The Prophet and recently had an award-winning turn in Guantanamo drama The Mauritanian, as well as a TV hit with BBC-Netflix show The Serpent.
Gyllenhaal broke out alongside her brother Jake in Donnie Darko and made her name with indie hits such as The Secretary and her Oscar-nominated turn in Crazy Heart, as well as appearing in blockbuster Batman flick, The Dark Knight.
Song Kang-ho has appeared in 40 films and is a favourite of his fellow South Korean Bong Joon-ho, who cast him in Snowpiercer and as the father in Parasite, the last film to win the Palme d'Or (as well as Best Film at the Oscars) in 2019.
The jury line-up is completed by French singing sensation Mylene Farmer, who has sold 35 million albums across a 35-year career.
The jury have the pleasure of a bumper crop of entries that promise a stellar year for the world's leading film festival after it was cancelled owing to the pandemic in 2020.
The selection includes films from US favourites Wes Anderson and Sean Penn, previous Palme winners Nanni Moretti, Jacques Audiard and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, as well as Iran's two-time Oscar winner Ashgar Farhadi.
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Dubai Bling season three
Cast: Loujain Adada, Zeina Khoury, Farhana Bodi, Ebraheem Al Samadi, Mona Kattan, and couples Safa & Fahad Siddiqui and DJ Bliss & Danya Mohammed
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Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
