Film About Abortion Takes Cannes' Prize (Palm d'Or)

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Film About Abortion Takes Cannes' Prize
By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, May 27, 2007

(05-27) 12:07 PDT CANNES, France (AP) --
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize Sunday with "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a harrowing portrait of an illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania.
The low-budget, naturalistic film about a student who goes through horrors to ensure that her friend can have a secret abortion beat out 21 other movies in competition for the Riviera festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or.
The grand prize, considered the festival's No. 2 award, went to Japanese director Naomi Kawase's "Mogari No Mori" (The Mourning Forest), a movie about two people — a retirement home resident and a caretaker at the center — struggling to overcome loss.
Best director went to American painter-director Julian Schnabel for his French-language film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," based on a memoir by a French magazine editor who became paralyzed after a stroke and learned to write again by blinking his eyelid into a sensor.
The jury awarded a special prize for Cannes' 60th anniversary to Gus Van Sant, who already won the festival's top prize in 2003 for "Elephant." The American's impressionistic "Paranoid Park" focuses on a teenage skateboarder whose life turns upside down when he accidentally kills a security guard.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2007/05/27/entertainment/e114252D94.DTL

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