CANNES: Elephant, a look at a school massacre very similar to the Columbine High shootings, won US director Gus Van Sant the Cannes film festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, at a glittering ceremony held yesterday.
Van Sant, who was previously best known for making Good Will Hunting, also received the Best Director prize for the film, a documentary-style fiction that follows school students in the hours leading up to the fateful finale.
The awards were seen as something of an upset, knocking aside the two films that had been at the top of almost every reviewer's list: Dogville by Danish director Lars von Trier, and The Barbarian Invasions by Canada's Denys Arcand.
But the VIP audience - among them Sting, Elizabeth Hurley and members of Charlie Chaplin's family - enthusiastically applauded the final result, announced by French actress Isabelle Huppert and the jury president, French director Partrice Chereau.
"Thank you jury for this prize, after all these years that I tried to get my films into the Cannes film festival," Van Sant said.
Cannes's runner-up Grand Prize went to Distant, a Turkish film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan that explores the emptiness of life and loneliness in the city. Its male leads, Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, shared the Best Actor award. Toprak died in a car accident the day after learning that the film had been selected to be shown at Cannes.
Best Actress went to Marie-Josee Croze for her role as a heroin junky who helps a dying man cope with his pain in The Barbarian Invasions. The French-language film also picked up the prize for Best Screenplay.
At Five in the Afternoon, a look at post-Taliban Afghanistan directed by 23-year-old Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, picked up the Jury Prize.
The closing ceremony wrapped up 12 days of screenings and movie deal-making that many of the 30,000 who attended qualified as "morose".
Most of the films in competition were considered unremarkable, especially compared to last year, when the Palme d'Or winner The Pianist by Roman Polanski went on to win three Oscars and Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's humorous documentary on gun violence in the US, received a special prize.
The struggling world economy and the SARS epidemic also conspired to cut US and Asian attendance this year, and the normally hectic party circuit, which was pared back, flagged early on.
The recognition heaped on Elephant confounded predictions, not least because of its unquestioning nature and lack of traditional explanatory scenes as it portrays an ordinary school day shattered by the violence wreaked by two alienated students in military gear.