A FRENCH film about an inspired teacher in a tough urban school won the Palme d`Or top prize at Cannes, the first homegrown movie in 21 years to claim the coveted award.
The Class by 46-year-old director Laurent Cantet features a multicultural cast of amateur child actors plucked from French schools.
It beat 21 other contenders to claim the trophy.
"It is a microcosm of the world, where issues of equality or inequality play out," Cantet said, flanked by more than a dozen of the Parisian pupils, as he accepted the trophy from actor Robert De Niro.
The Class is Cantet`s fourth feature and picks up on early themes in his work about social alienation.
The best actor prize went to Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro for his virtuoso performance as "Che" Guevara in Steven Soderbergh`s four-hour-plus epic on the Latin American revolutionary hero.
Brazil`s Sandra Corveloni won the best actress prize for her turn as a pregnant single mother of four in Sao Paolo in Line of Passage.
The 43-year-old Corveloni, in her first feature film role in the movie co-directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, plays cleaning woman Clueza, whose sons battle against the odds to avoid falling into a life of crime.
Best director honours went to Turkey`s Nuri Bilge Ceylan, an arthouse favourite, for his searing, visually stunning family drama, Three Monkeys.
The runner-up grand jury prize went to Italian anti-mafia drama, Gomorrah, based on an international bestseller. Another film about corruption in Italy picked another award.
Lifetime achievement awards went to cinema veterans Catherine Deneuve of France and actor-director Clint Eastwood, who entered the competition this year with The Exchange, an ambitious drama starring Angelina Jolie as a single mother whose son is kidnapped.
Jury president Sean Penn selected the winners with a nine-member panel including actress Natalie Portman and Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron.
He said the prize for The Class had been a unanimous decision "for an amazing, amazing film".
The politically-minded Penn, 47, had kicked off the movie world`s most prestigious showcase March 14 saying the winning filmmaker would be one who "is very aware of the times in which he or she lives".
He told a French newspaper this weekend that the duty of Cannes was to "do just the opposite" of the Oscars and crown a groundbreaking, unconventional film.
The 61st edition was dominated by hard-hitting pictures grappling with war, disease, poverty and corruption in what many cinema aficionados called a below-par competition.
The jury surprised many by shutting out Israel`s Waltz With Bashir, a first-ever animated documentary at Cannes that offered an unflinching look at the 1982 slaughter of Palestinian refugees in Beirut`s Sabra and Shatila camps.
Other highlights came outside the competition, including Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a warmly-received Woody Allen comedy starring Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson, and a moving Madonna film on AIDS orphans in Malawi.
Argentinian soccer legend Diego Maradona and former bad-boy boxer Mike Tyson also turned up on the French Riviera for flattering biopics on their chequered lives.
Cannes opened on a sombre note with many participants paying tribute to the victims of the devastating earthquake in China and the cyclone in Burma.
The competition went on to offer looks at dysfunctional families in Turkey and France, kids lured into a life of crime in Italy and Brazil, and the state bulldozing through citizens` lives in China.
And as in every year, there were a few howlers that left audiences baffled about their selection, including Serbis, a Filipino picture set in a porn cinema, and French drama Frontier of Dawn which Variety magazine called "a risible slice of pretentious hokum".
But the world`s top movie showcase left plenty of room for glitz, glamour and Hollywood largesse with the premiere of the first Indiana Jones movie in two decades, and hordes of champagne-swigging producers wheeling and dealing.
Last year, the Cannes jury gave the Palme d`Or to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a wrenching Romanian drama about an illegal abortion that went on to become an international arthouse hit.
Share this article
