Isabella Rossellini © AFP

The Italian-American actress and director Isabella Rossellini has kindly agreed to preside the Un Certain Regard Jury, the Official Selection of the Festival de Cannes made up of twenty films to be announced, along with the films In Competition, at the press conference on 16th April.

The daughter of Italian director Roberto Rossellini and Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, to whom this year’s Festival de Cannes is to pay tribute, Isabella began her cinematic career alongside her father as a dresser, before becoming acting for the Taviani Brothers – family friends who gave her a role in The Meadow (1979). Her career quickly took an international turn, with White Nights by Taylor Hackford (1985), Tough Guys Don’t Danceby Norman Mailer (1987), Les Yeux noirs (1987) by Nikita Mikhalkov, Blue Velvet (1986) and then Wild at Heart(1990) by David Lynch, for whom she played a number of mysterious and tortured female roles.

She went on to star in a wider variety of guises for both television and film in Italy and America but returned to arthouse cinema with Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral (1996), and Two Lovers by James Gray (2008), in which she played a role of remarkable intensity. In 2010 she appeared in The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Saverio Costanzo.

In 2008 following a request from Robert Redford, she threw herself into directing a miniseries devoted to the reproduction, seduction techniques and maternal behaviour of animals. Green Porno, Seduce me and Mammas– all produced by SundanceTV – revealed her irresistible comic talent and off-beat sense of humour. 
Isabella Rossellini and Jean-Claude Carrière then made a scenic version entitled Animals Distracted Me, which toured the world to great acclaim.

At the Festival de Cannes, Isabella Rossellini will take part in the tribute to her mother by attending the screening of Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words‏, a documentary by Stig Björkman being shown as part of the Cannes Classics.
She will also launch her own ‘Ingrid Bergman Tribute’ to celebrate the centenary of her mother’s birth. The show, directed by Guido Torlonia and Ludovica Damiani, will be based on both her autobiography and her correspondence with Roberto Rossellini and will play on some at the world’s major theatres.

With the help of a soon-to-be-announced Jury made up of artists, journalists and festival directors, Isabella Rossellini will award the Un Certain Regard Prize and meet the winners on Saturday 23rd of May, on the eve of the closing ceremony.

The 2014 Un Certain Regard was awarded by President of the Jury Pablo Trapero to White God directed by Kornél Mundruczó.