Juries and Guests
Juries and guests 2023
GUEST OF HONOUR

Volker Schlöndorff is a German filmmaker and one of the leading figures of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders.
Volker Schlöndorff moved to France in his teenage years. He started out in the cinema as assistant director to Jean-Pierre Melville (Léon Morin, Priest, 1961), Alain Resnais (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) and Louis Malle (The Fire Within, 1963).
In 1966, after returning to Germany, he directed his first feature film, Young Törless, based on a novel by Musil (winner of the Cannes Film Festival Critics' Prize). He then made a name for himself with The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum in 1975, co-directed with his wife, collaborator and actress Margarethe von Trotta (who also starred in Coup de grâce in 1976). He achieved worldwide acclaim with The Tin Drum (1979), based on the novel by Günther Grass and Palme d'or winner at Cannes tied with Apocalypse Now. It also won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1980.
Fond of literary adaptations, Schlöndorff often worked on his screenplays with Jean-Claude Carrière (Swann in Love, 1984; The Ogre, 1996). After several major co-productions, including The Handmaid's Tale in 1990, he returned to a more intimate setting with The Legend of Rita in 2000. 2007 marked his return to the Cannes Film Festival, where he presented Ulzhan in a special screening. This film marked the reunion of the director and actor David Bennent, twenty-eight years after their previous collaboration, The Tin Drum, won the Palme d'or.
He has since directed films such as Calm at Sea (2011), Diplomacy (2014) and, most recently, The Forest Maker, released in France on April 5, 2023.