Making the best of a weak slate of movies, the jury at the 63rd Festival de Cannes bestowed its Palme d'Or on the strongest movie in the competition. Jaded journalists shouted with joy when jury president named Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives--a low budget, part-Buddhist part-animist fantasy by the 39-year-old Thai director whose fans call him "Joe."
Accepting the award, Weerasethakul called the moment "surreal" (an adjective sometimes attached to his films) and thanked "all the many spirits and ghosts in Thailand" as well as the jury president Tim Burton, adding in English, "Mr. Burton, I really like your hair style." Burton, a disarmingly unprepossessing presence, was repeatedly prompted by emcee Kristin Scott-Thomas to name the winners and also had some problems with his microphone. Nevertheless, the prizes given by his jury seemed both reasoned and fair--and, unlike in previous years, went to generally small films.
The runner-up Grand Prix went to French director Xavier Beauvois's well-received Of Gods and Men, an understated docudrama about a group of French monks taken hostage by Algerian terrorists. As expected, Juliette Binoche was named best actress for her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy; she used her acceptance speech to again bring attention to the situation of jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi. The prize for best actor was split between Javier Bardem, star of Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful and Elio Germano, who appeared in Italian director Daniele Luchetti's La Nostra Vita, one of the poorest movies in competition.
South Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong received a deserved Prix du Scènario (Best Screenplay) for his much admired family drama Poetry; less expected, but genuinely crowd-pleasing, was the Prix de la Mise en Scène (Best Director) given to actor Mathieu Amalric for his stripper ensemble comedy Tournée. The Jury Prize went to A Screaming Man, an affecting film from Chad, directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.
The Camera d'Or went to Año Bisiesto, a Mexican film by an Australian director, Michael Rowe, shown in the Directors' Fortnight. The top prize in "Un Certain Regard" went to HaHaHa by the prolific South Korean indie Hong Sangsoo--a director whose rueful sex comedies are less an acquired taste than, as similar as they have become, a over-familiar one.
