In a year rocked by the #MeToo movement, the jury of the Cannes film festival is both majority female and led by a woman for the first time. Here are the nine members:
Cate Blanchett
One of the first women to call out Harvey Weinstein, Blanchett recently co-founded the Time’s Up movement in support of abuse victims.
She made her breakthrough as Britain’s flame-haired monarch Elizabeth I in the 1998 biopic, earning her the first of her six Oscar nominations.
Although she has never won anything at Cannes, her performance in Carol, where she played one half of a couple of illicit lesbian lovers, earned her rave reviews in 2014.
Chang Chen
Born into a family of actors, Chang got his first leading role aged 14 in A Brighter Summer Day, a violent four-hour epic about warring street gangs.
He has starred in several critically acclaimed Chinese-language films including Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, which won the best director award at Cannes in 2015.
Kristen Stewart
The award-winning actress also premiered her first short film as a director, Come Swim, at the festival last year.
Stewart, a Los Angeles native, was first spotted by a talent scout at age eight and had her breakout role opposite Jodie Foster in the 2002 thriller Panic Room.
But her career made a quantum leap when, at 17, she played broody teen Bella Swan who falls in love with a vampire in the Twilight films.
Khadja Nin
She has performed alongside music legends like Montserra Caballe and Sting, and collaborated with French screen legend Jeanne Moreau for a music video.
The daughter of a diplomat and youngest of eight children studied music from an early age before eventually moving to Europe.
Ava DuVernay
DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary 13th, named for the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery, offered a devastating account of mass incarceration of black men in contemporary American.
In March, she signed on to make the DC Comics superhero blockbuster, The New Gods.
Robert Guediguian
He also directed the much praised Le voyage en Armenie, a story set in his ancestral homeland.
Lea Seydoux
Starring in pictures by heavyweights ranging from Quentin Tarantino to Woody Allen, Seydoux is arguably best known to global audiences for her turn as a Bond girl opposite Daniel Craig in 2015’s Spectre.
But it was her soulful turn in Abdellatif Kechiche’s epic lesbian love story Blue is the Warmest Colour, which unusually captured the Palme d’Or for the director and the two leads, that made her a Cannes fixture.
Denis Villeneuve
The 50-year-old filmmaker made his Cannes debut two decades ago with August 32nd on Earth a drama about a model who confronts an existential crisis by deciding to have a baby with her best friend.
Andrei Zvyagintsev
It was pipped at the post by The Square, but the sombre story of the warped values of the country’s post-Soviet middle class was later nominated for best foreign film Oscar.
