Moore documentary wins at Cannes

The top prize at the Cannes Film Festival was today awarded to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing indictment of White House actions after the September 11 terror attacks.

It is the first documentary to win Cannes’ prestigious Palme d’Or since Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World in 1956.

“What have you done? I’m completely overwhelmed by this. Merci,” Moore said after getting a standing ovation from the Cannes crowd.

The grand prize, the festival’s second-place honour, went to South Korean film-maker Park Chan-wook’s Old Boy, a blood-soaked thriller about a man out for revenge after years of inexplicable imprisonment.

Moore was momentarily flabbergasted when he took the stage, a big difference from his fiery speech against United States President George W Bush when he won the best-documentary Academy Award for 2002’s Bowling for Columbine.

“You have to understand, the last time I was on an awards stage, in Hollywood, all hell broke loose,” Moore said.

The best-actress award went to China’s Maggie Cheung for her role in Clean, playing a junkie trying to straighten out her life and regain custody of her young son after her rock-star boyfriend dies of a drug overdose.

Fourteen-year-old Yagira Yuuya was named best actor for the Japanese film Nobody Knows, in which he plays the eldest of four siblings raised in isolation, who must take charge of the family when their mother leaves.

The directing and writing prizes went to French film-makers. Tony Gatlif won the directing honour for Exiles, his road-trip movie about a couple on a sensual journey from France to Algeria.

Agnes Jaoui and her romantic partner, Jean-Pierre Bacri, won the screenplay award for Look at Me, a study of an overweight young woman who feels neglected by loved ones. Jaoui and Bacri also co-star.

Fahrenheit 9/11 took the prestigious Palme d’Or amid sharply divided Cannes moviegoers, who found a solid crop of good movies among the 19 entries in the festival’s main competition but no great ones that rose to front-runner status.

While Fahrenheit 9/11 was well-received by Cannes audiences, many critics felt it was inferior to Bowling for Columbine, which earned him a special prize at Cannes in 2002.

With Moore’s customary blend of humour and horror, Fahrenheit 9/11 accuses the Bush camp of stealing the 2000 election, overlooking terrorism warnings before September 11 and fanning fears of more attacks to secure Americans’ support for the Iraq war.

Moore appears on-screen far less in Fahrenheit 9/11 than in Bowling for Columbine or his other documentaries.

The film relies largely on interviews, footage of US soldiers and war victims in Iraq, and archival footage of Bush.

Just back in Cannes after his daughter’s college graduation in the United States, Moore dedicated the award to “my daughter and to all the children in America and Iraq and throughout the world who suffered through our actions”.

Fahrenheit 9/11 made waves in the weeks leading up to Cannes after the Walt Disney Co refused to let subsidiary Miramax release the film in the United States because of its political content.

Quentin Tarantino headed the nine-member jury that handed out prizes in Cannes’ main competition.

Other jurors included actresses Kathleen Turner, Tilda Swinton and Emmanuelle Beart.

Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady – widely regarded by Cannes audiences as a “snoozer” for its elongated scenes of a man wandering a jungle alone, with no dialogue – won the festival’s third-place jury prize.

Another jury prize went to Irma P Hall for her role as an elderly Southern woman who foils a casino robbery in the Coen brothers’ crime comedy The Ladykillers” starring Tom Hanks as the gang’s ringleader and based on the popular British classic of the 1950s.