Iris Knobloch to become president of the Cannes Film Festival
- The former head of Warner France will succeed Pierre Lescure on 1 July
The German Iris Knobloch was elected today for three years as president of the Cannes Film Festival. She will succeed Pierre Lescure (who had been in office since 2014) on 1 July and will thus become the first woman to hold this position.
Head of Warner Bros. Entertainment France and Benelux for 14 years, then having extended her management to Germany, Austria, Benelux and Switzerland (under the WarnerMedia umbrella), Iris Knobloch had left the American major last year to found I2PO, an investment company in the entertainment and leisure industry. She was also a member of the latest selection committee to choose the French candidate for the Best International Film Oscar.
This Cannes Film Festival board was also supposed to discuss the possibility of modifying the rules in order to allow films without a theatrical distributor to participate in the official competition, in other words to give streamers the possibility of entering the race for the Palme d'Or. But an early outcry from the French film industry's representative organisations arguably put a stop to this idea, which will now be discussed again at a later date, and which means that the 2022 Cannes competition will do without streamer films again. To be continued...
(Translated from French)
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