Eye Haïdara, portrait of the Mistress of Ceremonies of the 79th Festival de Cannes

Shortly before May 12, in a quiet make-up room of the France Télévision offices in Paris, Eye Haïdara is wearing a fitted vintage suit and looking us straight in the eyes. She’s thoughtful and talks about the Festival with unbridled joy. “It’s like when you’re little and you would go to Parc Astérix or Disneyland Paris: you couldn’t sleep the night before.” She pauses, serious again. “This is a global stage. Film afficionados are watching and viewers are preparing for their annual meet. And for me, the stage is my favorite playground. It frightens me, yet at the same time, it entices me.”

It all began when she was six years old in a classroom in the 17th arrondissement in Paris. A passionate teacher started a theater club with his students and he set a high bar. What struck little Eye the most was not the discipline required, but that an all-knowing adult could remain a searching human being. “He would say: think, come on let’s keep thinking. I was six years old and I saw an adult who didn’t have all the answers. We were equals.” Decades later, she still sends him updates. “I still need him to follow me.”

Her father, a veritable walking video store, taught her the rest. “There were tapes all over the house, literally everywhere.” He loved epic tales, westerns, and old American movies with dialogues he knew by heart. Eye herself was more drawn to something else, to a more intimate type of cinema and to movies with children. Her father took note and added some tapes for her to his collection: Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), Rue Cases-Nègres (Sugar Cane Alley). “It wasn’t my type of movie, but he thought I would like it.”

Before being discovered on screen, Eye Haïdara honed her art on the most challenging public theater stages. After the Sorbonne and private lessons, she was admitted to the Eric Vigner Académie de théâtre in Lorient where she spent three years, then followed dramatic centers in France and the Festival d’Avignon. Yet, patience did not come naturally to her. “When you’re in your twenties, you’re in a hurry. But now I tell myself, everything came at the right time, every time.”

In La Taularde (Jailbirds) (2015) by Audrey Estrougo, alongside Sophie Marceau, she understood something crucial. She had been giving it her all, hurting herself physically to inhabit the role, she fasted for a week to prepare for a scene in solitary confinement. “You could barely tell.” She watched her co-star exhibit the same intensity, without ruining herself. “I don’t need to hurt myself to act. But as soon as you overact, you must go through with it. It’s the main thing when you’re young.” Sophie Marceau was not only strong and reassuring, but also provided counsel. “That meeting made me the actress I am today.”

Her breakthrough role came in 2017 with Le Sens de la fête (C’est la vie!). After an adolescence fraught by tragedy, she rediscovered the power of laughter on-set with Jean-Pierre Bacri.

In quick succession she then appeared in La Lutte des classes (The Battle of the Classes) (2019), Deux Moi (Someone, Somewhere) (2019), Les Femmes du square (The Nannies) (2022), Six jours, ce printemps-là (Six Days in Spring) (2025) by Joachim Lafosse, and more recently La Maison des Femmes (A Place for Her) by Mélisa Godet. Every filmmaker entrusted her with a different role and she rose to the challenge every single time.

This year, Cannes welcomes her back twice, she’s not only Mistress of Ceremonies of the 79th edition, she’s also in L’Objet du délit (Crescendo) by Agnès Jaoui, where she’ll be playing Cora, “the voice that will be breaking down doors to get the conversations going,” in an ensemble movie about generations that can no longer communicate with each other. Above all, she was fascinated by the filmmaker. “She placed a camera in one spot, did not move it and was able to convey what is happening inside 20 people’s heads, blending subtlety and nuance. That kind of gaze is very rare.”

Mata will be released at the end of May. It’s a spy thriller by Rachel Lang, in which Eye plays a DGSE security agent, subtly exploring new territory. We ask her if she’s tending toward more committed roles, but she counters, “My state of mind is to try a variety of different roles, but they have to speak to me. They should be alive, show humanity and a beating heart.”

On May 12, she will launch the celebrations at the Grand Théâtre Lumière. What will her mindset be? She doesn’t hesitate for a second: sincerity, passion, and joy. Forty years after the classroom in the 17th arrondissement, her teacher will certainly receive a message, “The stage is frightening, yet at the same time, it entices me.”