In a smashing French victory after 21 years, the French film, The Class, was awarded the Palme d’Or for best picture at the 61st Cannes film festival this year.

Prevailing by a unanimous decision of the jury, it became the first French film to win the festival’s main prize since “Under Satan’s Sun” in 1987. It is an evocation of contemporary society as seen through a year’s events in a Paris junior high school classroom.

The ‘Class” is a naturalistic portrayal of a tough Parisian high school where a teacher battles to maintain discipline, and touches on hot issues in France such as overcrowded classes and immigrant youth, although the film is not overtly political.

The last-minute entry, shown at the very end of the competition, captivated audiences. In announcing the Palme at the occasionally boisterous televised awards ceremony, jury president Sean Penn called “The Class” “an amazing, amazing film,” and further praised it at the subsequent jury press conference, calling it a “virtually seamless film. All the performances, magic. All the writing, magic. It just touched us so deeply.”

Runner-up award, the Grand Prix, went to “ Gomorrah”, Italian director Matteo Garrone’s unsparing look at organized crime in Naples, while Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the directing prize for “Three Monkeys,” an intense drama of a family pulled apart by crime and suspicion.

The nine member jury headed by Sean Penn, gave the Palm D’or for the Best Actor to Benecio Del Toro for playing Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s mammoth biopic ‘Che’ on the Latin American revolutionary

The coveted award for the Best Actress went to Sandra Corveloni for the Portuguese film Linha de Passe, in which she plays the role of a mother of four kids struggling for a better survival in a Brazilian slum.

The jury head Sean Penn confessed that this year, the competition was tough.
“There was a field of such powerful, emotional, moving movies, performances, there was so many times that we thought, it just can’t get better than this,” Penn said.