At the opening night of the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah on Thursday, Juliette Binoche was among the top honorees. But alongside being presented with an award from the festival for her contributions to cinema, the French screen icon also received an unexpected tribute from jury head Sean Baker.
While speaking on stage during the ceremony, the filmmaker behind last year’s multi-award winning hit “Anora” revealed that he wasn’t simply a huge fan of Binoche’s work, but he also had a framed poster of her 1991 romantic drama “Lovers on the Bridge” hanging on his wall.
Thankfully, both Oscar-winning actress and Oscar-winning director have managed to connect at the Saudi Arabian festival since then, with Binoche revealing that they had “exchanged numbers.”
Speaking at the Variety Lounge presented by Red Sea Film Festival on Saturday, Binoche also said that she’d even pitched to be in one of his films.
“I shouted at him: I want to work with you!”
Baker, she said, told her that he planned to move away from his previous style of filmmaking and “wants to do action movies.”
While Baker may have won the Palme d’Or for “Anora” in 2024, the decision for this year’s top Cannes prize actually fell largely on Binoche’s shoulders, with her serving as jury head. Several of the films in the official selection — including “Sirat” and “The Mastermind” — are screening in Jeddah, something she noted with pride.
“We were really happy as a jury to find those films,” she said. “We had a good year!”
The overall winner in Cannes was, of course, Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” a film that is now representing France at the next Academy Awards. It’s also a film that has seen Panahi recently sentenced in absentia to one year in prison by the Islamic Revolutionary Court over charges of “propaganda activities” against the Iranian system.
Binoche acknowledged the latest actions against Panahi, but also recalled the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where the Iranian filmmaker was set to serve as a jury member but couldn’t attend as he was being imprisoned in Tehran. It was also a year where Binoche won the best actress Palme for “Certified Copy.”
“They put his name on an empty chair to make the absence of his presence seen, and when I got my prize for best actress, I grabbed his name and put it in front of the camera and talked about Jafar,” she said. “And they liberated him three days days after. So I think the combination of having Cannes put him in the jury and, probably, I participated in a way. So giving him the prize 15 years after was so meaningful.”