Deborah Cole reports as the curtain falls on another festival, where the French finally picked up the Palm d'Or after a long wait thanks to a cast of amateurs.

The Cannes film festival wrapped up Sunday after awarding its top prize to a French classroom drama with a cast of amateurs in a banner year for movies with a conscience.

   In a popular choice, the jury led by US actor-director Sean Penn gave the
festival's coveted Palme d'Or to "The Class", featuring a multicultural cast
of first-time teenage actors all plucked from the same Parisian secondary
school.

   The picture, shot in documentary style and based on the bestselling memoir
of French teacher Francois Begaudeau, beat out 21 other contenders to claim the trophy in a year dominated by dark dramas on social ills.

   "The film had to show society as a whole -- it had to be diverse, teeming, complex -- and it also needed to show the social tension," said Cantet, flanked by two dozen of the pupils, as he became the first French filmmaker to win Cannes gold since 1987.

   The relevance of the picture, Cantet's fourth feature, has been pointed up
by ongoing street protests by French schoolchildren and teachers against
cutbacks in education.

   The politically minded Penn, 47, said the nine-strong jury had chosen the
Palme d'Or unanimously.

   "It's simply everything you'd want a film to give you," he told reporters.
   "In a world that hungers for education and a voice, it just touched us
deeply."

   New York Times critic A.O. Scott said Cantet had attacked a familiar
storyline "with freshness and precision, and without a trace of
sentimentality."

   Penn had said at the start of the 12-day festival that the winning filmmaker would be one who "is very aware of the times in which he or she lives." Politically potent cinema also dominated the remaining awards.

   In another unanimous choice, the best actor prize went to Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro for his virtuoso performance as "Che" Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's four-hour-plus epic on the Latin American revolutionary hero.

   Brazil's Sandra Corveloni won the best actress prize for her riveting turn as a pregnant single mother of four in "Line of Passage" -- her first feature
film, directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas.

   The 43-year-old Corveloni plays weary cleaning woman Clueza whose sons
battle against the odds to avoid slipping into a life of crime in a working
class district of Sao Paolo.

   Best director honours went to Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan, an arthouse
favourite, for his searing, visually rich family drama "Three Monkeys".

   The runner-up Grand Prize went to Italian drama on the corrosive influence
of the mafia, "Gomorrah", based on an international bestseller.

   Another film about corruption in Italy, "Il Divo" about seven-time prime
minister Giulio Andreotti, won the Jury Prize.

   Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time Palme d'Or winners,
claimed best screenplay for "The Silence of Lorna" about illegal immigration.

   "Hunger," a biopic on the Irish Republican Army prisoner Bobby Sands who
died on a hunger strike in a British prison, won the Camera d'Or prize for
best first feature.

   The jury surprised many by shutting out "Waltz With Bashir", a first-ever
animated documentary at Cannes that offered a deeply critical look at Israel's
indirect involvement in the 1982 slaughter of Palestinian refugees in Beirut's
Sabra and Shatila camps.

   Lifetime achievement awards went to US actor-director Clint Eastwood, whose film "The Exchange" starring Angelina Jolie as a single mother whose son is kidnapped had been in competiton; and French actress Catherine Deneuve, who appeared in the darkly funny competition entry "A Christmas Tale".

   Other highlights at 12-day Cannes came outside the competition, including
the first Indiana Jones movie in two decades, and "Vicky Cristina Barcelona,"
a warmly received Woody Allen comedy starring Penelope Cruz and Scarlett
Johansson.

   Argentinian soccer legend Diego Maradona and former bad-boy boxer Mike
Tyson also turned up on the French Riviera for flattering biopics on their
chequered lives.

   Last year, the Cannes jury gave the Palme d'Or to "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2
Days," a wrenching Romanian drama about an illegal abortion.

Here is the complete list of awards handed out at the festival's closing ceremony.
 
   - Palme d'Or: "The Class" by Laurent Cantet (France)
 
   - Grand Prize runner-up: "Gomorrah" by Matteo Garrone (Italy)
 
   - Jury Prize: "Il Divo" by Paolo Sorrentino (Italy)
 
   - Best Actress: Sandra Corveloni, Brazil, for her role in "Linha de Passe"
(Line of Passage)
 
   - Best Actor: Benicio Del Toro, US, for his role in "Che"
 
   - Best Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan of Turkey for "Three Monkeys"
 
   - Best Screenwriter: Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne of Belgium for
"Lorna's Silence"
 
   - Lifetime Achievement Award: French actress Catherine Deneuve and US
director Clint Eastwood
 
   - Palme d'Or for a short movie: "Megatron" by Marian Crisan, Romania
 
   - Camera d'Or for Best First Movie: "Hunger" by Steve McQueen, Britain
 

(AFP - Expatica May 2008)