Julianne Moore will head the jury at upcoming 79th Venice Film Festival

Julianne Moore will get the chance to enjoy her craft in a whole new light this year. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera has announced that the veteran actor will lead the jury at the upcoming festival’s 79th edition. This year’s Venice is scheduled to run from August 31 to September 10.

Although this is Moore’s first time in such a consequential role at the festival, her onscreen work has received the festival’s highest honors in the past. In 2002, she won Venice’s Coppa Volpi acting award for her work in Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven. Moore is also the first American woman to garner a top acting prize in every one of Europe’s top festivals: Venice, Berlin (for Michael Cunningham’s 2002 interwoven period drama The Hours), and Cannes (for David Cronenberg’s comedically acerbic nightmare Maps to the Stars).

Moore’s work was last on the Lido in George Clooney and the Coen brothers’ 2017 team-up Suburbicon. The darkly satirical film saw Moore play Margaret Lodge, an icy housewife in a segregated 1950s town born and bred on the malevolent pedigree of thinly-clad Aryan ideals. When an African-American family moves to town, the aforementioned ideals are laid bare as can be. As if her morals couldn’t grow more heinous, Margaret really fucks over her paraplegic identical twin sister (for those who’ve never seen the film, we’ll just have to leave it at that.) Moore’s embodiment of the role saw her win the Franca Sozzani award at Venice that year.

Moore will be joined on the panel by a fellow creative luminaries who have seen their work, in one format or another, presented at the festival. The other jury members include French director Audrey Diwan, who won a Golden Lion at last year’s festival for her drama Happening, Iranian actress Leila Hatami, known for her work in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, and British author Kazuo Ishigiro, who wrote the seminal bodily-autonomy classic “Never Let Me Go.” They’ll be joined three additional Venice veterans, directors Leonardo di Costanzo of Italy, Mariano Cohn of Argentina, and Rodrigo Sorogoyen of Spain.

The lineup of films slated for this year’s festival will be announced on July 26.