CANNES - The Cannes film festival returned to its arthouse roots this year, as it celebrated its 60th anniversary, rewarding a nervy, small-budget Romanian movie with its top Palme d'Or prize and largely snubbing big-name US directors.
"4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days", by 39-year-old filmmaker Cristian Mungiu, beat out 21 other competition features, including ones by previous Palme winners Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant and the Coen brothers, in Cannes' award night held late Sunday.
The victory of his movie, which evokes big themes of personal freedom and alienation in a wrenching story about a girl's back-alley abortion in communist-era Romania, was the "ultimate recognition" for his work, Mungui said after picking up his trophy from Jane Fonda.
"I hope this Palme d'Or will be good news to small film-makers from small countries," he said in his quiet voice.
"It seems, finally, that you don't need big budgets and big stars to make a story everyone will listen to."
The festival's runner-up Grand Prix trophy went to "The Mourning Forest," a low-key tale by Japanese director Naomi Kawase about people haunted by deep personal loss.
Third place, the Jury Prize, was shared by "Persepolis," an autobiographical animation about grim life under the ayatollahs in Iran by French-Iranian debut director Marjane Satrapi, and "Silent Light," a Mexican movie about love, death and faith, by Carlos Reygadas.
"I want to dedicate this prize to all Iranians," Satrapi said, days after Tehran slammed her film as misrepresenting the "achievements of the Islamic revolution."
A South Korean actress and a Russian actor picked up awards for their performances in two other films that dealt with mortality and grief.
Although US directors were over-represented in the competition line-up, only a couple picked up lesser prizes.
Julian Schnabel, who made the French-language "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" about a mute and paralysed former French magazine editor who struggles to write a book, won the Best Director award, while Van Sant picked up a special Cannes 60th anniversary honour.
Tarantino, who presented "Death Proof", a rollicking but insubstantial action flick about a group of women who turn on a car-obsessed psychopath, got nothing, as did David Fincher, who screened "Zodiac", about a real-life serial killer who terrorised California in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Cannes jury this year was headed by British director Stephen Frears and included actresses Maggie Cheung of Hong Kong and Toni Colette of Australia, and Turkey's Nobel prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk.
The triumph of "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" marked one of the rare times the jury's choice coincided with that of the critics, who had from the beginning put it neck-and-neck with the Coen brothers existential noir cowboy movie "No Country for Old Men".
As the movie industry bible Variety put it, the Romanian movie was "one of the few Cannes films in memory to have led wire-to-wire in critics' polls and come out on top on awards night."
The magazine added, however, that "the remainder of the awards bore all earmarks of compromise-necessitated give-and-take... the selection zig-zags among the esoteric, the political and the female-driven."
Cannes' artistic director Thierry Fremaux, who chose the 22 films in competition, said the jury favoured the cutting edge of contemporary filmmaking.
"By rewarding Romania, Mexico and South Korea, the jury highlighted three of the most stimulating countries in international cinema in recent years," he told AFP.
In Romania, media, moviemakers and critics hailed Mungui's win.
"This is the most important prize and it's extraordinary that it was given to a Romanian film," said Corneliu Porumboiu, a film-maker of Mungiu's generation.
"In the last four years Romania has won prizes at Cannes, which must be a confirmation that Romanian cinema has for some years reached the top."
Another filmmaker, Cristi Puiu, who won a prize in a sidebar Cannes competition in 2005, said he hoped the attribution of the Palme this year had thrown the "door wide open" to other opportunities for his country's tiny cinema industry.

05/28/2007 11:06 GMT