<img title="Image: http://www.myvivvo.com/thumbnail.php?file=art.del.toro.ap_900784891.jpg&amp;size=article_medium" src="http://www.myvivvo.com/thumbnail.php?file=art.del.toro.ap_900784891.jpg&amp;size=article_medium" alt="French film wins Cannes top prize">
										
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								<span>The French film "The Class," a frank tale about classroom 
life using real students and teachers at a junior high school, won top 
honors Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival.<br><br>Directed by Laurent 
Cantet, "The Class" ("Entre les Murs") 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.<br><br>The win was a unanimous decision among the nine-member Cannes jury, said Sean Penn, who headed the panel.<br><br>"The
 movie that we wanted to make had to resemble French society, had to be 
multifaceted, a bit teeming, complex, and had to sometimes portray 
frictions that the film didn't try to erase," Cantet said.<br><br>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.<br><br>Benicio
 Del Toro won Cannes' 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 foment a 
similar rebellion in Bolivia in the 1960s.<br><br>Del Toro, who co-starred in Penn's "21 Grams," also won in a unanimous jury vote, Penn said.<br>"I'd
 like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara," said Del Toro. 
He also thanked Soderbergh, "who got up every day, forced me to this. 
... He was there pushing it, and he pushed all of us."<br><br>Soderbergh directed Del Toro to the supporting-actor Oscar for 2000's "Traffic."<br><br>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. It was her first role in a feature film.<br><br>Turkish
 filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan was named best director for "Three 
Monkeys," which centers on a father who takes the rap for his employer's
 crime in exchange for financial support for his wife and son, only to 
have the scheme backfire amid bitter repercussions.<br><br>Belgian 
siblings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time winners of the Palme 
d'Or, received the screenplay prize for "Lorna's Silence," about an 
immigrant woman who enters a sham marriage to gain Belgian citizenship.<br><br>The
 prize for a film by a first-time director went to British filmmaker 
Steve McQueen's "Hunger," set at a Northern Ireland prison where IRA 
volunteer Bobby Sands and other inmates seeking Irish independence 
staged a hunger strike in 1981.<br><br>The Cannes jury awarded special 
prizes to Clint Eastwood, who directed the competition film 
"Changeling," and Catherine Deneuve, who appeared in two films at Cannes
 this year.<br><br>Eastwood was shut out for key prizes with "Changeling," his warmly received missing-child drama starring Angelina Jolie.<br><br>Eastwood,
 who delivered two best-picture and director Academy Award recipients 
with "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," has never won top honors at
 Cannes after five times in competition there since 1985.<br><br>Jury 
president Penn won the best-actor Oscar for Eastwood's "Mystic River," 
which was shut out for prizes at Cannes five years ago.<br><br>"There 
was a field of such powerful, emotional, moving movies, performances. 
There was so many times that we thought, it just can't get better," Penn
 said.<br><br>Critics judged the Cannes lineup more harshly, however. 
While Cannes presented few outright bombs this time, critics found the 
films a bit tepid.<br><br>Last year's competition included such films as
 Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men," which went on to win 
the best-picture Academy Award, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent 
Paronnaud's animated coming-of-age tale "Persepolis," which was 
nominated for the animation Oscar.<br><br>A film from Kazakhstan, Sergey
 Dvortsevoy's "Tulpan," won a secondary competition called "Un Certain 
Regard." "Tulpan" is the story of an aspiring shepherd on the isolated 
Kazakh steppes who must wed before he can enter his chosen trade but is 
refused by the only prospective bride because she thinks his ears are 
too big.<br><br>Bosnian director Aida Begic's "Snow," a drama about 
villagers struggling with the decision to leave their war-ravaged town, 
won top honors in another Cannes competition overseen by critics.<br><br>After
 the awards ceremony, the festival closed with the premiere of Barry 
Levinson's "What Just Happened?", starring Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis 
and Penn in the tale of a fading Hollywood producer trying to rejuvenate
 his career amid personal and professional crises.<br><br>"What Just Happened?" came full circle: A year ago, Levinson and his collaborators were at Cannes filming scenes for the movie.</span>
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