Jane & Cannes

Selected in Cannes from her very first three short films, Jane Campion is, as we know, the only woman in Competition to have won the Palme d’or. She is also the only one, amongst the award-winning directors, to have received the Palme d’or both for a short film and for a feature film. Last year, as President of the Cinéfondation & Short films Jury, she quipped, in praise of hard work: “You learn how to be a filmmaker, by making films”. It is the seventh time she is taking part in the Festival, which has presented nine of her films. So goes the history of the Festival de Cannes, enhanced with every new encounter with the director that it has watched as she came to maturity. Landmarks.

►1986

Jane Campion was selected for the first time in Cannes. Her first short film, Peel, won the Palme d’or. Simultaneously, she presented three films in Un Certain Regard: 2 Friends, Passionless Moments and A Girl’s Own Story, which she describes this way: “I reconstruct what might have been the childhood of a little girl seen through her own eyes. I wanted to lift a corner of the veil, peak into these years where the family seems so unreal, the age of adulthood a rupture, innocence so equivocal.” The recurring motifs that animate the rest of her filmography are already present in the work.

Interview with Jane Campion about her first selection and her relationship with the Festival de Cannes © Extract from Gilles Jacob, l’arpenteur de la croisette by Serge Le Péron.

►►1989

Her first feature film, Sweetie, is screened in Competition. If its reception at the Festival is mixed, it will later be recognised as a work that bears the mark of the director’s iconoclastic style: dark humour, a striking visual treatment and acute look at suburban family life.

Geneviève Lemon, Karen Colston, Jane Campion – Sweetie, 1989 © AFP

►►►1993

This was the moment of recognition in Cannes for the New Zealand director. Her passionate drama, The Pianowon the Palme d’or, and the Prize for best actress went to Holly Hunter for her admirable incarnation of the silent Ada.

Holly Hunter and Michel Piccoli, 1993 © AFP

►►►►2007

For the sixtieth anniversary of the Festival and at the invitation of Gilles Jacob, she joined 34 of the greatest directors of the present day in the collective adventure of To each his own cinema, a choral declaration of love on the big screen in which she inscribed her short film “Lady Bug”.

Chacun son cinéma, 2007 © AFP

►►►►►2009

Jane Campion is back in Competition with Bright Star, where the lovelife of John Keats and of Fanny Brawne is poetically enacted with a romanticism and refinement that are unanimously acclaimed by critics.