Bobby Sands film a Cannes winner while Palme d’Or goes to France

The 61st Cannes Film Festival came to a close on Sunday night with the top prize - the Palme d'Or - going for the first time in ten years to a
home-grown film. Directed by Laurent Cantet (pictured with the cast), Entre les Murs - or The Class - follows a year in the life of a teacher in a tough Parisian school and features improvised performances by schoolchildren. The teacher is played by Francois Begaudeau, who wrote the book on which the film was based.

There was a big prize too for a British film: the Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen won the Camera d'Or for best debut film - presented to him by Dennis Hopper - for Hunger, about the death in Northern Ireland's Maze prison of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.

Sean Penn, president of the festival jury, called The Class "an amazing,
amazing film" and said it was one of two unanimous verdicts, the other being the best actor prize, which went to Benicio Del Toro for the title role in Steven Soderbergh's Che. Despite his performance, the four-hours-plus movie was widely criticised and still has no American distributor.

Best actress went to Sandra Corveloni, who played a working-class Sao Paulo mother in the Brazilian film Linha de Passe. Clint Eastwood, who had hopes of winning the Palme d'Or for his new film Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie, had to make do with a 'special prize' which Sean Penn described as a cross between a lifetime achievement award and an acknowledgment of bold new work. Catherine Deneuve, in town with her new film A Christmas Tale, got one too.