Ken Loach's 'Wind That Shakes the Barley' Wins Top Prize at Cannes

[Scurrilous]

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""The Wind That Shakes the Barley," a film about the Irish rebellion against British rule and the country's subsequent civil war, won the top prize at the 59th Cannes Film Festival on Sunday. This was the 13th time Ken Loach, at 69 the oldest director in competition this year, had brought a film to Cannes. He has won several prizes, but never before the Palme d'Or. This year he got lucky.

Speaking in French and English, Mr. Loach, with his customary quiet directness, said he hoped his movie — one of several war films shown during the festival — might represent "a little step in the British confronting their imperial history."

"Maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present," he added.

An unspecified modern war, albeit one with obvious allusions to Afghanistan and Iraq, is at the center of Bruno Dumont's "Flandres," the runner-up, taking the Grand Prize. This is the second time Mr. Dumont, one of the most controversial of contemporary French directors, has won that honor. When his "Humanité" won in 1999, it caused a minor scandal, an event not repeated this year, although many festivalgoers were nonetheless surprised — some unpleasantly, given Mr. Dumont's brutal, dehumanizing world view — by the award.

In a striking departure from tradition, the competition jury, headed by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, spread the wealth this year by dividing the prizes for best actor and actress among a total of 10 actors and actresses: the "family" of women in Pedro Almodóvar's "Volver" and the "brotherhood" in Rachid Bouchareb's "Indigènes" ("Days of Glory"). Perhaps the presence of so many actors on the jury — five of the nine members, among them the Italian bombshell Monica Bellucci, the lovely Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang and Samuel L. Jackson, perennially one of the coolest men in Hollywood — inspired this generosity."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/movies/29cann.html