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WORLD PERFORMING ARTS CONTROVERSIES

 

Bush put-down nets top prize

Photo: Michael Moore, flanked by Charlize Theron, left, jury chairman Quentin Tarantino and actress Kathleen Turner, brandishes his Palme d'Or. Picture: AFP

The grand cinema in Cannes erupted with excitement last night when Michael Moore won the film festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, for his controversial film Fahrenheit 9/11. Jury president Quentin Tarantino had tears in his eyes as the audience rose as one to shout and stamp their approval. Cannes veterans could not remember a prize attracting such universal excitement. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sustained but hilarious tirade against the Bush presidency, beginning with the disputed Florida election count and reaching a crescendo in its condemnation of the Iraq war. Speaking at the press conference after the awards ceremony, Moore said he should have thanked his cast - Mr Bush's advisers. "In a sense I believe them to be actors. The love scene between Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, brought a tear to my eye," he said. The film still has no distributor in the US since Disney decided not to let its subsidiary, Miramax, distribute the film it had financed. Given this dispute, Moore agreed, the prize would inevitably have been seen in the US as primarily political. "I fully expect the Fox network and other right-wing media to try to portray the award as coming from the French," he said. "But the jury had one French citizen. Four of the jury of 11 were Americans and, if you wanted, you could add that the majority of the jury came from the coalition of the willing."

The fact was, he said, the Cannes Film Festival was the most important international festival in the world. Moore said his most rewarding moment came when Quentin Tarantino specifically told him that the jury members did not all agree with Moore's politics, but that this was a prize for his achievement in cinema. He said this thrilled him because he had been brought up in a family of movie buffs and still went to the cinema three or four times a week. "I started out thinking I'd like to make a good movie," he said. "In terms of its impact, the first impact I want is for people to leave the theatre feeling that was a good way to spend two hours. The art of this, the cinema, comes first. If I wanted to make a political speech I'd run for office. If I wanted to give a sermon I'd go back to the seminary. But that isn't what I've chosen to do." Moore had already returned to the US for his daughter's graduation on Friday after the screenings of his film earlier in the week, but the festival flew him back with his wife and daughter for the ceremony. Asked how he thought Mr Bush would react to his win, he laughed and said: "Will he even know what this is?" He hoped, he said, that nobody told him while he was eating a pretzel.   Several festival prizes went to Asian films, which have had a remarkably strong showing at Cannes this year. The Grand Prix, effectively second prize, went to Korean director Park Chan-wook for his revenge drama Old Boy. Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung won the best actress award for her performance as a demoralised junkie in Olivier Assayas's Clean.  The best actor award went to Yagira Yuya, an unknown Japanese child actor in Kore-Eda Hirokazu's moving film Nobody. Even more surprisingly, a film from Thailand - which only a few years ago produced no films at all - won the jury prize: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady.