Cristian Mungiu's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days'", a grim and gritty tale about a young woman seeking an illegal abortion in the final days of Romania's Communist dictatorship, won the Palme d'Or prize for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival over the weekend.The award makes it a double triumph in Cannes for Romania. Romanian director Cristian Nemescu, who was killed in an automobile accident in August 2006, was posthumously awarded the top prize in the Une Certain Regard section of the festival for his film "California Dreamin".
At the post awards press conference, winning director Mungiu said that the Palme d'Or was "so much more important than the Oscars. It says we are real filmmakers.'"
"Mogari no Mori", or "The Mourning Forest'", directed by Naomi Kawase of Japan, won the runner-up Grand Prix award. This poignant film tells the story of a careworker and a retirement home resident who help each other come to terms with past grief after becoming stranded in a remote forest.
Julian Schnabel of the U.S. was voted best director by a nine-member jury chaired this year by British film maker Stephen Frears. Schnabel won for "Le Scaphandre et le Papillon" (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), the true story of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffered a stroke that left him permanently unable to move or speak, and how he dictated his biography by blinking his eye....BloombergTV
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