Reporting from Cannes, France -- It felt like “friends and family" night at the Festival de Cannes when the world's most prestigious film event handed out its awards on Sunday.
With French actress Isabelle Huppert as president of the jury, prizes in three of the eight categories went to French filmmakers, another went to an actor who speaks some of his lines in French and the Palme d'Or went to a director who has made some of his best-known films in French, including one with the jury president.
That would be Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose The White Ribbon marked a return to German-language filmmaking for the director of Cach. Impeccably made with hypnotic skill and control and set in a kind of Village of the Damned in northern Germany in the years before World War I, this carefully controlled black-and-white venture (which also won the FIPRESCI international critics prize) is as disturbing underneath as it is seemingly placid on the surface.
Huppert, who presented the award, said she was giving it “with a certain emotion," and when Haneke, who'd directed Huppert in 2001's The Piano Teacher, came on stage to accept it, actress and director exchanged a clearly emotional hug.
The two most popular awards of the night went to French films. Jacques Audiard's A Prophet, by general consensus the best film of the festival, got the Grand Prix, considered Cannes' runner-up prize.
