Following in the footsteps of our two previous presidents, the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and the Argentinean director Pablo Trapero, the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino will lead the Directors' Jury for MyFrenchFilmFestival, the online French Film Festival created by UniFrance.
"I love French cinema, particularly the films by François Truffaut: his notion of cinema has always been a source of inspiration for me. I'm convinced that you should approach this work knowing that 'to make a film is to improve life, to arrange it in your own way, it's prolonging childhood games.' With this conviction I will joyfully direct the Directors' Jury of MyFrenchFilmFestival, an opportunity to discover and to reveal new French artists thanks to the tools the latest technology offers us for watching films!"
It is with these words that Paolo Sorrentino wished to confirm to UniFrance his participation as the head of the Directors' Jury of the 8th edition of MyFrenchFilmFestival.
The full Jury and complete film selection of the 2018 edition will be announced on January 9, 2018.
The 8th edition of MyFrenchFilmFestival will take place from January 19 through February 19, 2018. Accessible on close to fifty platforms, the festival is free in many countries. We recall that, in 2017, the event set a new record of 6.7 million viewings throughout the world.
An Italian director and screenwriter, Paolo Sorrentino directed his first film, L’Uomo in Più starring Toni Servillo, in 2001. The pair united four years later for Les Conséquences de l’Amour, presented in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and which revealed him to international audiences. He returned to Cannes in 2006 with The Family Friend and again in 2008 with Il Divo, which was awarded the Jury Prize. His next film, This Must Be the Place, starring Sean Penn, also selected for Cannes, was his first foray into English language cinema and caused a surprise. In 2013, Sorrentino was back in Cannes with The Great Beauty. A few months later it won the Oscar and Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He presented Youth, starring Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine, in Competition at Cannes in 2015. In 2016,he created the series The Young Pope, starring Jude Law, for HBO. The series was a great success in many countries. His ninth feature, a biopic about Silvio Berlusconi played by Toni Servillo, is planned for the summer of 2018.
