'Boonmee' wins top honor at Cannes fest

CANNES, France - The hypnotic Thai film "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" won the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, while Academy Award winners Juliette Binoche and Javier Bardem earned acting honors.

"Uncle Boonmee," directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, traces the dreamlike final days of a man dying of kidney failure as the ghost of his dead wife returns to tend him and his long-lost son comes home in the form of a furry jungle spirit.

Binoche, an Oscar winner for "The English Patient," won best actress for the cryptic love story "Certified Copy," directed by past Palme d'Or winner Abbas Kiarostami.

During her speech, Binoche pleaded for the release of Kiarostami's countryman, detained Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi - who had been asked to be on this year's nine-member jury.

"I hope he will be here himself next year," Binoche said, as she clutched a nameplate emblazoned with the director's name. "It's hard to be an artist and an intellectual, and the country needs you."

Bardem, an Oscar winner for "No Country for Old Men," shared the Cannes best-actor prize, earning his honor for Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's "Biutiful," a grim portrait of a dying father supporting his family with a variety of criminal rackets in Barcelona. Also playing a father in crisis, Elio Germano shared the best-actor award for Italian filmmaker Daniele Luchetti's "Our Life," a drama about a widower with three sons.

"I'm very happy that we are sharing the best actor," Bardem said at a news conference alongside Germano, adding it should happen more often "so less people lose. It's very hard for people to lose in the sense of, in a festival, you can't really say what's best. I mean, it's nine people's opinion, and I've been on the jury here, and I can assure you that it's very, very difficult to put nine people in agreement to like anything."

The second-place grand prize went to French director Xavier Beauvois' solemn drama "Of Gods and Men," based on the true story of seven French monks beheaded during Algeria's civil war in 1996.

Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's stark film "A Screaming Man" received the third-place jury prize. The film chronicles the tragic consequences for a father after he loses his cherished job as a swimming pool attendant to his son amid his country's civil war.

French actor-filmmaker Mathieu Amalric won the directing award for "On Tour," in which he plays the manager of a troupe of American burlesque strippers performing around France. Amalric invited his five stripper stars to join him on stage as he accepted the prize.

The screenplay honor was presented to South Korean director Lee Chang-dong for "Poetry.