This year, French actress Anaïs Demoustier, 35, is President of the Caméra d’Or Jury which attributes the coveted award to the best first feature film presented in one of the Festival’s selections.

Born in Lille, France, Demoustier began her career when she was a teenager. In an interview with www.Crash.fr, she talked about the moment which would forever change her life. “I had been doing after-school drama since I was little, and one day a casting director came into my class looking for children to act in a film he was directing in our area. It was only half a day on set, but I loved it. At 13, I signed up with a casting agency, got two months’ work in Le Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf) by Michael Haneke. This experience really confirmed my decision to make acting my career.”

It did not take long before she became one of the busiest actresses in French cinema, working with directors like Claude Miller, François Ozon, Christophe Honoré, Cédric Gimenez, Bertrand Tavernier.

She has appeared in some fifty movies in her twenty years career, including The Class (2008), Sweet Evil (2010), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011), Alice and the Mayor (2019) for which she won the Best Actress César award, and The House by the Sea (2021). A versatile performer, Demoustier counts several tv movies to her credit and she has also appeared on stage in several plays, notably in Le Problème, by François Bégaudeau.

Demoustier will be seen in Along Came Love, written and directed by Katell Quillévéré (Heal the Living), shown in the Cannes Première selection. She plays Madeleine, a waitress and mother of a young boy, who meets Francois (Vincent Lacoste), a wealthy student with whom she becomes involved.

Next for her is Daaaaaali! helmed by her Smoking Causes Coughing director Quentin Dupieux, with an all-star French cast including Romain Duris, Pierre Niney, Gilles Lellouche and Alain Chabat. The story revolves around the surrealist artist Salvador Dali. It chronicles the plight of a French journalist who meets Dali on several occasions to discuss a forthcoming documentary on him.

Demoustier is also starring in The Beast in the Jungle, adapted from the 1903 eponymous Henry James novel, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.