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There is a particular kind of presence that has nothing to do with volume. Khaled Mouzanar has it. The Lebanese composer and producer has spent two decades building it the hard way, through compositions that move people, and films that arrived at Cannes and left an indelible mark.
Mouzanar has co-written, produced, and scored films substantial enough to take the Jury Prize at Cannes, earn an Oscar nomination, and cement his place as one of the more significant creative figures to emerge from Lebanon in the last two decades, but in the way that the best film composers tend to disappear into their work. Years later, we still hum the scores and sing the songs he built for Nadine Labaki’s films, Caramel, Where Do We Go Now?, and Capernaum.
It’s no surprise then that this year, Cannes asked Mouzanar to serve as a jury member for Un Certain Regard at the 79th edition of the festival, the section that has historically been the festival’s most searching, its most willing to sit with films that resist categorisation. Mouzanar arrived at Cannes to sit on the jury alongside French actress Leïla Bekhti, who presided, and three other jurors — Senegalese producer Angèle Diabang, Italian director Laura Samani, and French filmmaker Thomas Cailley. Un Certain Regard has long served as a platform for formally inventive debuts and unconventional storytelling, a section that highlights filmmakers at the beginning of their international careers, where the jury’s decisions can significantly shape future distribution and festival trajectories. It is not, in other words, a ceremonial seat.
For an occasion of such regard, he dressed in ZEGNA,
The Italian house, under artistic director Alessandro Sartori, has spent the better part of a decade moving away from seasonal reinvention, away from trend-chasing, toward the project of owning a specific look, defining, as Sartori has put it, the style of tomorrow. Where other houses favor spectacle, Sartori’s vision pivots inward, toward introspection and lineage. His is not a pin-sharp, wrinkle-free interpretation of luxury, but a far more soulful approach. For a composer who has always let the work outlast the moment, the alignment runs deep.
Styled by Sleiman Dayaa, Mouzanar wore a ZEGNA black wool and silk tuxedo with a peak lapel, a white silk shirt, straight-leg trousers in the same cloth, and a black silk bowtie, on the festival’s opening night on May 12th, and again at the Un Certain Regard opening ceremony on May 13th. Across subsequent red carpet appearances in the festival’s second week, including the premieres of El Ser Querido on May 19th and The Man I Love the following evening, the look was also dark and clean.
On May 22nd, at the Un Certain Regard Awards Ceremony, Mouzanar was back on stage, this time to announce what the jury had decided. Capernaum won in this section in 2018, and the full-circle moment wasn’t lost on anyone paying attention. Cannes is a city of surfaces. The people who move through it most gracefully tend to be the ones who understand that the surface is never really the point.
