Austrian film wins top prize

DH at Cannes: The White Ribbon takes Palme dOr

The White Ribbon — Austrian director Michael Haneke’s morality tale shot stunningly in black & white and set in a German-speaking village where strange incidents shake the traditional Protestant populace in a year leading to the First World War — walked away with the coveted Palme d’Or.

The best actor award went to Austrian Christoph Waltz, whose portrayal of a suave but extremely violent Nazi intelligence officer in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will probably be counted among the best screen villains. The best actress was Charlotte Gainsbourg of France, whose violent acts in Danish director Lars von Trier’s Antichrist repelled many.

The Grand Prize, which counts after the Palme d’Or, went to Jacques Audiard’s gritty prison drama A Prophet, which has a scene where the young protagonist slices the neck of a fellow prisoner with a blade held between his teeth.

The Jury Prize went jointly to Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s priest-turned-vampire bloody tale Thirst and British filmmaker Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, and the best director was Brillante Mendoza of the Philippines, whose Kinatay left many cold with its violent tone, including a scene of a physical dismemberment of a woman.

The jury, headed by French actress Isabelle Huppert and including India’s Sharmila Tagore, chose Feng Mai for best screenplay award for Spring Fever, a gay love story by Lou Ye, who has been banned by China for bringing his Summer Palace to Cannes in 2006.

The White Ribbon deservedly won the top award as a film which has as its undercurrent reasons that led to the rise of Fascism in 20th century Europe, and its narrative has lessons for today too, when religious extremism is raising its ugly head in the world.