Village drama wins top prize at Cannes

CANNES (France) — Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, a chilling study of malice in a German village on the eve of World War I, snatched top honours at the Cannes film festival yesterday.

The Austrian director's austere black-and-white work overcame stiff competition from films by heavyweight auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Jane Campion to win the coveted Palme d'Or at the world's greatest cinema showcase.

The notoriously extravagant festival toned down the glitz for this year's recession-era bash and was lighter than usual in star power but it still saw celebs like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie sashay up the fabled red carpet.

A range of other prizes were dished out to the 20 films in competition, with French director Jacques Audiard, who had been a frontrunner for the Palme, taking the Grand Prix for his bleak prison drama A Prophet.

Cult South Korean director Park Chan-Wook and Britain's Andrea Arnold jointly took the jury prize for Thirst, a vampire romance, and Fish Tank, a coming-of-age drama set in a grim London suburb.

Austrian television star Christoph Waltz clinched the best actor award for his role as a multilingual Nazi nicknamed the "Jew Hunter" in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

France's Charlotte Gainsbourg took the best actress award for her taboo-defying role as a woman driven insane by grief in the shock Danish thriller Antichrist by Lars Von Trier.

Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines picked up the best director prize for Kinatay, while Australian Aboriginal director Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, was awarded the Camera d'Or prize for a first film.

Penelope Cruz was among the A-list celebrities at the annual French Riviera bash, who also included Martin Scorsese and Jim Carrey.

Tarantino's march up the red carpet — flanked by Pitt and his wife Jolie — for the world premiere of his long-awaited Basterds on Wednesday provided the biggest celebrity buzz of the 12-day festival. AFP

From TODAYOnline.com, World News – Monday, 25-May-2009; see the source article here.

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