The 62nd Festival de Cannes was dominated by films addressing dark, heavy themes with graphic candour. Many of those productions were rewarded tonight when jury president Isabelle Huppert announced the winners at the gala closing ceremony in the Festival Palais, writes MICHAEL DWYER, Film Correspondent
The most coveted prize, the Palme d'Or, went to Austrian director Michael Haneke for his austere but powerful The White Ribbon, which is set among a small Protestant community in northern Germany in the year before the outbreak of the first World War
The runner-up award, the Grand Prix du Jury, was given to French director Jacques Audiard for his tough, immensely stylish picture of a 19-year-old man's experiences over a six-year sentence in the prison drama, A Prophet.
For the first time in Cannes history, this year's jury had a majority of women, five out of the nine members, and in a decision certain to be controversial, they gave the best director award to Filipino filmmaker Brilliante Mendoza for Kinatay(Slaughter). It features an extended, deeply disturbing sequence in which a prostitute is abducted, beaten, raped, murdered and dismembered.
The jury honoured the festival's other most provocative and deliberately unsettling entry, Lars von Trier's Antichrist, by giving the best actress award to Charlotte Gainsbourg. In the most startling of several scenes that resort to shock tactics, she engages in genital mutilation with the aid of gruesome special effects.
The best actor award was presented to Austrian actor Christoph Waltz for his richly entertaining portrayal of a slyly charming but utterly ruthless SS colonel in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, a wildly fictional adventure in which violence is unrestrained.
The award for best screenplay went to director Lou Ye for Spring Fever, which dares to depict the relationships – heterosexual, gay and bisexual – of five young characters, three men and two women, in present-day Nanjing. Its sexual candour ensures that the film has no prospects of a cinema release in China.
In marked contrast to all the excesses on Cannes screens over the past 12 days was Wild Grass(Les Herbes Folles), a melodrama made in classical style by veteran French director Alain Resnais (87). He received a sustained standing ovation from the Cannes audience when he was presented with an "exceptional" award for his remarkable body of work.
The White Ribbon, set in a village in northern Germany, follows a series of sinister crimes for which a group of children, cruelly disciplined by their parents, emerge as the prime suspects.
"My wife sometimes ask me a very female question - "Are you happy?" the 67-year-old told the closing awards ceremony.
"It's very difficult to reply, I find, because happiness is a rare thing, but now I can say, this is a moment in my life when I am really happy."