Cannes Film Festival jury, topped by Isabelle Huppert, has announced its top prizes out of the fest including the Palm d’Or, the highest prize awarded to competing films and there were certainly a few surprises.
Before I get to the winning film, Charlotte Gainsbourg won Best Actress for the controversial Antichrist directed by Lars von Trier, which was then quickly followed by a win by Christoph Waltz winning Best Actor for his part in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Best Director went to Brillante Mendoza for his Philippine production Kintay, a film Roger Ebert vocally disliked saying, “Here is a film that forces me to apologize to Vincent Gallo for calling The Brown Bunny the worst film in the history of the Cannes Film Festival.” Ebert continued adding, “If Mendoza wants to please any viewer except for the most tortured theorist (one of those careerists who thinks movies are about arcane academic debates and not people) he’s going to have to remake his entire second half.”
The Grand Prix award, the runner-up to the Palm d’Or went to the critical favorite A Prophet and the top prize went to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon a film that received plenty of good buzz and was considered one of the top four potentials along with Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, which took the Special Jury Prize.
The White Ribbon follows a northern German community enmeshed in a series of nasty events right before the beginning of World War I. Sony Pictures Classics has already picked up the film for US Distribution so expect it to hit theaters later this year and certainly this makes it an instant contender for Best Foreign Language Oscar.
Haneke won Best Director at Cannes in 2005 for Cache.
You can check out an excerpt for the film from the Festival directly below and seven images from the film can be found in our gallery here
