(Paris) Actress Chiara Mastroianni has been appointed mistress of ceremonies for the 76th Cannes Film Festival, whose official selection this year gives pride of place to Italian cinema.
The daughter of French Catherine Deneuve and Italian Marcello Mastroianni will present the opening ceremony on May 16, as well as the closing ceremony on May 27, organizers said. She succeeds Virginie Efira who officiated last year.
A regular at Cannes and a key figure in French auteur cinema, the actress won the Un Certain regard interpretation prize for her role in Christophe Honoré’s Room 212 in 2019, eleven years after having been part of the feature film jury. .
It “represents the elegance, the audacity and the intelligence of a cinema open to the world”, underline in a press release Brut and France TV, the official partners of the festival, which will broadcast the ceremonies live.
The official selection of the festival was announced on Thursday, giving pride of place to Italian cinema with three films in competition, Towards a Bright Future by Nanni Moretti, The Kidnapping of Marco Bellocchio and The Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher.
Five weeks before the start of the race for the Palme d’Or, the festival should extend its list of films in competition, as well as reveal the composition of the jury of which we only know for the moment the president, the Swedish director Ruben Östlund , Palme d’or last year with his film Without filter.
