Juries and Guests
Guest of Honour
Volker Schlöndorff, the guest of honour
Volker Schlöndorff is a German filmmaker and one of the major figures of the New German Cinema of the 1960s-1970s, alongside filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders.
Volker Schlöndorff went to live in France during his adolescence. He earnt his spurs 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 made his first feature film, Young Törless, inspired by a novel by Musil (Critics’ Prize at Cannes). He then established himself with his film The Lost Honour of Katherine Blum in 1975, co-directed by Margarethe von Trotta, his wife, collaborator and actress (she also appears in Coup de Grâce made in 1976). He became renowned the world over with The Tin Drum (1979), an adaptation of the novel by Günther Grasse and joint winner of the Palme d’or in Cannes with Apocalypse Now. It was also awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980.
A lover of literary adaptations, Schlöndorff often works on his screenplays with Jean-Claude Carrière (Swann in Love, 1984; The Ogre, 1996). Following several large co-productions including The Handmaid's Tale in 1990, he went back to a more intimate setting with The Legend of Rita in 2000. 2007 was the year of his return to the Cannes Film Festival where he presented Ulzhan in a special screening. This film marked the renewed collaboration between the director and the actor David Bennent, twenty-eight years after the Palme d’or was awarded to their previous work together, The Tin Drum.
Since then, his films include Calm at Sea (2011), Diplomacy (2014) and his latest, The Forest Maker, that was released in France on 5th April 2023.
