Film about illegal abortion wins Cannes’ top prize

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize Sunday with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a harrowing portrait of an illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania.

The film beat 21 other movies in competition at the Riviera festival for the Palme d’Or.

The grand prize, considered the festival’s Number 2 award, went to Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s Mogari No Mori (The Mourning Forest), a movie about two people, a retirement home resident and a caretaker at the centre, struggling to overcome loss.

Best director went to American painter-director Julian Schnabel for his French-language film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on a memoir by a French magazine editor who became paralysed after a stroke and learned to write again by blinking his eyelid into a sensor.

The jury awarded a special prize for Cannes’ 60th anniversary to Gus Van Sant, who won the festival’s top prize in 2003 for Elephant. The American’s impressionistic Paranoid Park focuses on a teenage skateboarder whose life turns upside down when he accidentally kills a security guard.

Two films shared the jury prize: Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s moving, funny adaptation of her graphic novel about growing up during and after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which she co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud; and Stellet Licht (Silent Light), Carlos Reygadas’ tale of forbidden love set among Mennonite farmers of northern Mexico.

Acting honours went to Russia’s Konstantin Lavronenko, who played a troubled husband The Banishment, a Russian drama about a couple whose marriage disintegrates during a stay in the country. The prize for best actress went to South Korea’s Jeon Do-yeon, who played a widow struggling to cope with her husband’s death in Secret Sunshine.

German director Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven, a German-Turkish cross-cultural tale of loss, mourning and forgiveness, won the prize for best screenplay. Akin both wrote and directed the film.

Earlier this weekend, a Romanian director posthumously won a secondary Cannes competition called Un Certain Regard. Cristian Nemescu died in a car crash last year at age 27, leaving his California Dreamin’ incomplete.

Jurors had initially decided not to judge the film, about American soldiers in a small Romanian village, but changed their minds when they saw it.