Swiss director to head Camera d’Or Jury at Cannes

Ursula Meier is a French-Swiss film director, who has made successful movies such as Home and Sister Keystone

Swiss film director Ursula Meier will preside over the Camera d’Or jury for best first feature film at the 71st Cannes Film Festival this year, it was announced on Tuesday. 

The Camera d’Or prize is given to the best first film presented in the Official Selection, the Semaine de la Critique and the Directors’ Fortnight categories at CannesExternal link. It will be awarded during the closing ceremony on May 19. Last year’s Camera d’Or was won by Léonor Serraille for “Montparnasse Bienvenue”, which world premiered in the Un Certain Regard category.

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Meier, who will be assisted by six fellow panelists in Cannes, said in a statement: “A first film is the place of all possibilities, of all audacity, of all risk-taking, of all madness. It is often said that you should not put everything into a first film but the opposite is true, you should put in exactly that — everything — just as you should put everything into every film while always preserving deep within yourself that original, vital, brutal, wild desire of the first time. What immense excitement and joy to discover all these films!” 

Meier is best known for her debut movie Home (2008), and Silver (2012), which won the special runner-up Silver Bear award at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival. It was chosen as the Swiss entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards in 2013. 

The Swiss director started her career as assistant director to Alain Tanner, a major figure in Swiss cinema. In 2014, she took part in the film “Bridges of Sarajevo”, a collective work by 13 European filmmakers that was presented at Cannes in the Official Selection.