US director Spike Lee will head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in July, organizers said Tuesday, making him the first black person to take on the role.
The feted New York film-maker was supposed to perform the function at last year's event, but it was canceled due to the pandemic.
Accepting the invitation in a recorded Twitter message, Lee said he was "very humbled.”
"Way back in 1986, my very first film Shes Gotta Have It played there and it was my introduction to the world of cinema, so Cannes will always have a deep, deep spot in my heart," he said.
With COVID-19 still circulating at high levels in France, and the country making slow progress in its vaccination campaign, doubts remain over whether this year's edition will go ahead as planned from July 6 to 17, having already been delayed from its usual slot in May.
It would be the biggest get-together for the global industry in more than a year, with most other festivals either canceled or relegated to online versions in recent months.
Lee, 63, has been a fixture at Cannes over the years, premiering seven of his films there and winning the second-place Grand Prix in 2018 for BlacKkKlansman about a black police officer infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan.
"Throughout the months of uncertainty we've just been through, Spike Lee has never stopped encouraging us," said festival president Pierre Lescure in a statement.
"We could not have hoped for a more powerful personality to chart our troubled times."
Lee exploded on to the film scene at Cannes in 1986 with She's Gotta Have It, which took home the Youth Award.
Shot on a shoestring in New York, the story of a young New Yorker trying to choose between three men has become a cult classic and was recently remade as a Netflix series.
When he returned to the Cote d'Azur three years later, he was in the main competition with Do The Right Thing, his landmark film about one sweltering day of charged race relations in Brooklyn.
Jungle Fever (1991), Girl 6 (1996), Summer of Sam (1999), Ten Minutes Older (2002) have also featured at the festival.
The last Palme d'Or winner was South Korea's Bong Joon-ho for Parasite in 2019.
