The ANNOTICO Report
 
While the French film "The Class": ("Entre les Murs") won the Palme d'Or, both the Grand Prix and the Jury Prize, first and second runner-up, as it were  went to Italian films: the grand prix to Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah" a brutally realistic examination of organized crime in Naples; and the jury prize to "Il Divo," Paolo Sorrentino's highly stylized portrait of the former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti.
 

The president of the jury, Sean Penn, said the award for "The Class" was one of two unanimous verdicts. The other was the prize for best actor, given to Benicio Del Toro, who played the title role in Steven Soderbergh's "Che." Other winners included Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time Palme d'Or recipients, who took the screenplay award for "Le Silence de Lorna," about the struggles of a young Albanian immigrant in Belgium. Sandra Corveloni, who played a working-class mother in Sco Paulo in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas's "Linha de Passe," won the best-actress award, which the directors accepted on her behalf. The directing award went to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for "Three Monkeys," about a disintegrating Turkish family.

Both the grand prix and the jury prize , first and second runner-up, as it were went to Italian films: the grand prix to Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah," a brutally realistic examination of organized crime in Naples; and the jury prize to "Il Divo," Paolo Sorrentino's highly stylized portrait of the former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. The Camira d'Or for best first feature, awarded by a separate jury (led by the French director Bruno Dumont), went to Steve McQueen's "Hunger," which unsparingly depicts the protests of imprisoned I.R.A. militants in the 1980s.

Continuing a Cannes tradition of improvisation, the jury conferred two special prizes, which Mr. Penn described as a combination of a lifetime achievement award and an acknowledgment of bold new work. The winners were Catherine Deneuve (born in 1943) and Clint Eastwood (born in 1930). Ms. Deneuve, who appears in "A Christmas Tale," a family drama directed by Arnaud Desplechin, accepted her award. Mr. Eastwood, whose competition entry, "Changeling," was expected by many to win a top prize, was absent....

The venturesome IFC Films picked up three titles: "A Christmas Tale," "Hunger" and "The Chaser," a violent Korean thriller about a serial killer. Sony Pictures Classics confirmed that it also had bought three movies: "Le Silence de Lorna"; "Waltz With Bashir," an animated documentary about veterans of the 1982 war in Lebanon by the Israeli director Ari Folman; and the Norwegian film "O' Horten," from Bent Hamer ("Kitchen Stories," "Factotum"). Sony Classics is also rumored to be going after James Toback's documentary "Tyson," a sympathetic portrait of the former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson.

"We kept telling ourselves and were being told by everyone else what a weak Cannes this has been" Michael Barker, co-president of Sony Classics, wrote in an e-mail message, "until we woke up one morning and realized that this could shape up to be the best Cannes we ever had. The sleepless nights this year did not come from the parties; they came from debate over merits of films (with colleagues, journalists, exhibitors, people on the street) and images from the films themselves that we could not shake." ...

For the critics and the industry, this was perhaps not a festival of revelations but rather 12 days of solid, diverse work with inevitable disappointments balanced by some fine selections. As usual, many movies in and out of competition dealt with social and political problems: crime, poverty, disease, incarceration and war, with a little pornography and family dysfunction to lighten the mood. Also notable was the number of aesthetically and technically innovative works shot in digital. Although the results can sometimes look like smeared mud (see the competition entry from Singapore, "My Magic"), the new technologies mean that a movie can look like something completely new (the startlingly sharp lines of Jia Zhang-ke's "24 City") or very much like old-fashioned celluloid ("Che"). Mr. Soderbergh shot that movie on a new high-definition, 10-pound camera (the RED) that afforded him extraordinary fluidity in difficult terrain....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/movies/26cann.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin#

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