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Cannes Film Festival jury president Spike Lee is the star of the event’s 2021 poster.

Organizers released the image for the festival’s 74th edition on Thursday, listing the various reasons as to why the acclaimed director — whose 2020 appointment as jury president carried over to 2021 — was chosen as the face of the festival:

For the immense impatience to finally find ourselves again in the Cannes setting: the seaside ,the palm trees and the silver screen, just like a blank page, that will welcome the films of the Official Selection…

For that curious look he is going to put on the work of his fellow filmmakers who bring us news of the World – of theirs and surely a little bit of ours too…

For this personal view that he has shared with us since his very first feature: shot in black and white in the heat of summer 1985, he was already shaking up cinema by imposing, even back then, his ground-breaking style, imbedded in urban and pop culture…

For this tender take he embodies as Mars Blackmon, the B-Boy in She’s Gotta Have It – a stereotypical representation of the Afro-American community that the film blows apart…

For his mischievous eye which, despite constantly questioning and incessantly rebelling for nearly four decades, never neglects entertainment…

… Spike Lee, citizen of the “People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York”, is on the poster of this collector’s edition. Of course!

Who else?

Lee is the first Black president to lead the festival jury, and now he’s also the first president to ever feature on the poster. The only other time a jury president has been even tangentially involved in the poster was in 2006, when jury head Wong Kar-Wai’s iconic film “In The Mood For Love” was the focus, featuring a silhouetted Maggie Cheung in a doorway.

Lee has a long history with Cannes that stretches back over 30 years. His Netflix film “Da 5 Bloods” was slated to play out of competition last year, marking the streaming giant’s return to the Official Selection, but the in-person event was canceled due to the pandemic. Several of his previous films, including “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and “BlacKkKlansman” (2018), have also premiered at the festival.

Here’s a full look at this year’s poster below:

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Cannes Film Festival

 

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