05/26/2008
French film The Class, a frank tale about classroom life using real students and teachers at a junior high school, won top honours Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival.
Directed by Laurent Cantet, The Class was the first French film to win the main prize, the Palme d'Or, at Cannes since Under Satan's Sun in 1987. The docudrama was shot in a raw, improvisational style to chronicle the drama that unfolds over one school year.
The win was a unanimous decision among the nine-member Cannes jury, said Sean Penn, who headed the panel.
Italian films won the second-place grand prize and third-place jury prize.
Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, a study of the criminal underworld in Naples, took the grand prize, while Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, a lively portrait of former Premier Giulio Andreotti, won the jury award.
Benicio Del Toro won the best-actor prize for Che, Steven Soderbergh's four-hour-plus epic about Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. Presented as two films, Che follows Guevara and Fidel Castro's triumphant guerrilla campaign to overthrow Cuba's government in the late 1950s and Guevara's downfall and execution after trying to fement a similar rebellion in Bolivia in the 1960s.
Sandra Corveloni was chosen as best actress for Linha de Passe, in which she plays the mother of four brothers struggling to make better lives for themselves in a Brazilian slum.
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