The 2024 Cannes Film Fest competition jury, led by president Greta Gerwig, met the press Tuesday — and it didn’t take long before the assembled stars were asked to address the various fraught political issues swirling around this year’s edition of the world’s most glamorous film fest.

On the eve of the 77th festival, Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux attempted to distance the event from hot-button topics, saying at his presser, “We are trying to have a festival without these polemics. In Cannes, the politics should be on the screen.”

Gerwig was asked almost immediately how France’s recent #MeToo movement was affecting this year’s Cannes festival.

“I think people in the community of movies telling their stories and trying to change things for the better is only good,” she responded. “I have seen substantive change in the American film community, and I think it is important that we continue to expand that conversation.”

“Well, I certainly support labor movements and we’ve certainly gone through this just now in our unions in the U.S. film industry,” Gerwig replied. “I hope that the festival and the workers can form an agreement that is good for them,” she added.

Next, Gerwig and fellow juror Lily Gladstone, star of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, were baited with a question about how they felt — as women — with their being a Donald Trump movie in the festival’s competition, Ali Abasassi’s The Apprentice.

Smiling but also audibly sighing, Gerwig began her careful answer by saying, “I try to come to every film with an open mind and an open heart.”

Gerwig said the jury had discussed that very issue the night before with Fremaux.

“The marvelous thing about cinema is that it’s a slow art form,” she went on to say, explaining how feature films are works that require years of focused consideration to create and hours of quiet contemplation to consume. “In that space, artists from all over the world get to say something extremely specific and extremely personal… So, I think, actually, just the very act of watching cinema and engaging with it seriously is part of the discussion of what’s difficult [in the world].

She added: “It certainly is important to consider it, and I think the very nature of Cannes does consider it.”

Alongside Gerwig and Gladstone, this year’s Cannes’ Palme d’Or will be selected by French stars Eva Green and Omar Sy, Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (Capernaum), Spain’s Juan Antonio Bayona (Society of the Snow), Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters), and Turkish screenwriter and photographer Ebru Ceylan, co-writer of 2014 Palme d’Or winner Winter Sleep (with director husband Nuri Bilge Ceylan).