The Cannes Film Festival has announced that Puerto Rican actor Benicio del Toro will preside the jury for this year's edition of Un Certain Regard section at the 71th edition of French event. It is the second time the actor participates as a Cannes jury as he participated as a member of the jury in the official competition in 2010, which was spearheaded by filmmaker Tim Burton.
Born in San Germán, Puerto Rico and raised in Pennsylvania, del Toro boasts a film career spanning over three decades. An Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award winner, he's worked in over fifty films and has worked with numerous prestigious filmmakers including Bigas Luna (Huevos de Oro, 1993), Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, 1996), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, 2000, Che, 2008), Terry Gilliam (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998), and Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, 2003), among others.
In 2008, del Toro received the award for Best Actor in Cannes for his role as Che Guevara in Soderbergh’s two-part film. He made his directorial debut with the short film El Yuma, part of the omnibus film 7 Days in Havana, which premiered at Un Certain Regard in 2012.
In addition to Che, Del Toro has participated at Cannes with four additional films: The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), The Pledge (Sean Penn, 2001), Sin City (Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller, 2005) and more recently, Sicario ( Denis Villeneuve, 2015).
The 71st edition of the Cannes Film Festival will take place May 8-19 in France.
