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'Elephant' wins Palme d'Or at Cannes
Sunday, 25 May , 2003, 23:53
Cannes: "Elephant", a look at a school massacre very similar to the Columbine high shootings, won US director Gus Van Sant the Cannes film festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, at a glittering ceremony in Cannes late on Sunday.
Van Sant, who was previously best known for making "Good Will Hunting", also received the Best Director prize for the film, which follows students in the hours leading up to the fateful finale.
The awards were seen as something of an upset, knocking aside the two films that had been at the top of almost every reviewer's list: "Dogville" by Danish director Lars von Trier, and "The Barbarian Invasions" by Canada's Denys Arcand.
But the VIP audience gathered in this French Riviera town for the closing awards ceremony -- among them Sting, Elizabth Hurley and members of Charlie Chaplin's family -- enthusiastically applauded the final result, announced by French actress Isabelle Huppert and the jury president, French director Partrice Chereau.
"Thank you jury for this prize, after all these years that I tried to get my films in to the Cannes film festival," Van Sant said.
Cannes' runner-up Grand Prize went to "Distant", a Turkish film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan that explores the emptiness of life and loneliness in the city.
Its male leads, Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak, shared the Best Actor award. Toprak died in a car accident the day after learning that the film had been selected to be shown at Cannes.
Best Actress went to Marie-Josee Croze for her role as a heroin junky who helps a dying man cope with his pain in "The Barbarian Invasions". The French-language film also picked up the prize for Best Screenplay.
"At Five in the Afternoon", a look at post-Taliban Afghanistan directed by 23-year-old Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, picked up the Jury Prize.
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