German Drama The White Ribbon Takes Top Cannes Prize
At the end of this year's Cannes Film Festival, the competition's top prize, the Palme d'Or, was handed to Austrian director Michael Haneke for The White Ribbon, a black-and-white drama set in northern Germany during the years before World War I. One viewer describes the film as "[i]mpeccably made with hypnotic skill and control," with a story that is "as disturbing underneath as it is seemingly placid on the surface."
For his well-received drama A Prophet, which follows "a young Arab man's coming of age and into power during six years inside a corrupt, brutal prison," French director Jacques Audiard accepted the Grand Prix prize. The only win for an American film was the best actor prize given to Christoph Waltz, who plays a Nazi colonel in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. In his speech, "Waltz thanked Tarantino, saying 'with your passion and conviction, you gave me my vocation back.'"
