CANNES, France — Austrian director Michael Haneke's somber drama "The White Ribbon" claimed the top prize Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the Quentin Tarantino and Lars von Trier entries earned the acting honors.
It was a big night for Austria, whose triumphs included Christoph Waltz as best actor for Tarantino's World War II epic "Inglourious Basterds." Charlotte Gainsbourg won the best-actress honor for von Trier's "Antichrist," a film that riled and repelled many Cannes viewers with its explicit images of physical abuse involving a grieving couple.
The second-place grand prize went to French director Jacques Audiard's prison drama "A Prophet," about an illiterate inmate who educates himself and becomes a player in drug and smuggling circles.
Gainsbourg delivers a terrifying performance as a psychotic woman torturing her husband (Willem Dafoe) and mutilating herself during a trip to the woods intended as a healing sojourn after the death of their child.
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Waltz earned the best-actor award for his gleefully homicidal role as Nazi Col. Hans Landa, renowned in Germany as an ace "Jew hunter" in "Inglourious Basterds," Tarantino's rewrite of the history books that follows the exploits of a band of Jewish Allied commandos led by Brad Pitt. Tarantino spins a wildly different take on how the war ended.
"Above all, I owe this to Hans Landa and his unique and inimitable creator, Quentin Tarantino," Waltz said. "You gave me my vocation back."
The directing award went to Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza for "Kinatay," a harsh story centered on police inflicting bloody retribution on a prostitute who crossed them.
Chinese director Lou Ye's "Spring Fever," a tale of forbidden romance involving homosexual relationships, won the screenplay award for writer Mei Feng. The prize for best first film went to Australian writer-director Warwick Thornton for "Samson and Delilah," his love story about two teens living in an isolated aboriginal community.
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