In Cannes, where the 75th Film Festival opened, Forest Whitaker was the international star of the evening of Tuesday May 17. The American actor received an honorary Palme d’Or for a career marked in particular by the Performance Prize received here in 1988 in birdby Clint Eastwood.
We saw him as a bloodthirsty tyrant in The Last King of Scotlandby Kevin Macdonald in 2006, where he played Idi Amin Dada. He was also a contract killer in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samuraiby Jim Jarmusch in 1999. But naturally, Forrest Whitaker seems the most peaceful of men.
The 60-year-old actor isn’t content to just shine in Hollywood. Ten years ago, he created an NGO that fights poverty, from South Sudan to Mexico. A humanitarian fiber born during filming on the African continent.
” I was working in Uganda and I met the director of an orphanage in the north of the country. And I recognized, in the eyes of the children, what I had experienced myself growing up : the stress, the problems that we have to overcome. I started to work in Uganda, to create housing, and then with Unesco, to set up branches elsewhere in the world. But of course it all started when I connected to my African roots “, he explains.
There is a look, a way, a legend that impresses…
Actor, director and producer Forest Whitaker will receive an honorary Palme d’or at the Opening Ceremony of the 75th Cannes Film Festival tonight at 7 p.m. #Cannes2022 pic.twitter.com/gp8BO9YfeE— Cannes Film Festival (@Festival_Cannes) May 17, 2022
A humanitarian commitment that also goes through France, with actions planned in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis. Forest Whitaker also mixes cinema and humanitarianism by producing the documentary In the name of peacea film directed by Christophe Castagne and Thomas Sametin, shot in a camp for displaced people in South Sudan and screened here in world premiere.
