Cannes 2002; Polanski bounces back at Cannes

True story of Jew evading the Nazi death camps takes Palme d'Or

The veteran Polish director Roman Polanski won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival last night for his film The Pianist, based on the true story of a Jewish musician who evaded the Nazi death camps by hiding in the ruins of Warsaw during the second world war.

It was a disappointing night for British hopes, with only the Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, who wrote the Ken Loach-directed Sweet Sixteen, winning the best screenplay award for a story about a Greenock teenager lured into drug dealing to pay for a home for his jailed mother.

The award of the Palme d'Or to The Pianist was greeted with only polite applause and some boos from critics at the festival. It banishes the memory of Polanski's last, disastrous, premiere at Cannes with his 1986 film Pirates, and represents a return to serious material after such frivolous flops such as the 1999 film The Ninth Gate.

It is a profoundly personal work for Polanski, who survived the Krakow ghetto during the war, but whose mother died in a Nazi concentration camp. The film is pitted with details that he recalled from his wartime experiences as a child.

Critics last night suggested that the award might have been a placatory gesture by the Cannes jury, which was headed by the US director David Lynch, particularly as some Jewish groups had called for film makers to boycott the festival because it was held in a town where one in three people last month voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front.

The Palme d'Or is a timely honour for Polanski, who is trying to negotiate a deal with the authorities in the United States, where he has been charged with raping a 13-year-old girl in a jacuzzi at Jack Nicholson's home in Los Angeles in 1977, and other sex offences. He has been publicly pardoned by the woman he is alleged to have attacked, and hopes that this will allow him to return to the US without facing charges.

Polanski, who was born in Paris but grew up in Krakow, said: "I'm honoured and moved to accept this prize for a film that represents Poland."

The Pianist, adapted for the screen by the British playwright Sir Ronald Harwood, is based on the story of musician Wladislaw Szpilman, played by an American actor, Adrien Brody. In the picture, Szpilman sees his parents (played by British actors Maureen Lipman and Frank Finlay) shipped from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, but manages to avoid capture himself by hiding in the apartments of sympathetic Polish gentiles, and later holing up in a bomb-ruined garret. Later in the film, he meets a Nazi officer who admires his musical virtuosity and helps him survive.

Although acknowledged to have an important role in educating younger generations about the Holocaust, the film was not favoured for the top prize by critics. It was not considered to have the high degree of artistic creativity of some of his early great movies: Knife in the Water, Repulsion or Chinatown.

The award of the Grand Prix to the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki for his terse but winningly romantic Helsinki-set drama, The Man Without a Past, was greeted much more enthusiastically. The film also carried off the best actress award for Kati Outinen. The unofficial award of best speech went to the director who stumbled around the stage before grabbing his certificate and saying: "First, I would like to thank myself. Second, I would like to thank the jury. Goodbye."

The least successful speech was made by a the burly American documentary maker Michael Moore, whose film about US gun law, Bowling for Columbine, won a special award. In a rambling speech, he attempted to address the Cannes sophisticates in incoherent high-school French, prompting one critic to yell: "Just like his movie - he needs a good editor". He was better when he spoke in English. The director, whose film castigates the gun lobby and criticises George Bush, asked the festival director if he would lay on a special screening for the US president.

The most political speech came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from Ken Loach's screenwriter, the former lawyer Paul Laverty. He said his prize celebrated the "auld alliance" between Scotland and France, a truth diminished somewhat by the fact that he collaborated heavily on the script with the director, who was born in Nuneaton.

Laverty praised the French organisers of the festival for creating a celebration of cinema from across the world, and contrasted its multicultural tenor with the remarks of the home secretary, David Blunkett, who he condemned for saying Britain was being "swamped" with asylum seekers.

Cannes 2002; Awards given Sunday at the 55th Cannes Film Festival

• Palme d'Or (Golden Palm): "The Pianist," Roman Polanski, Poland-France
• Grand Prize: "The Man Without a Past," Aki Kaurismaki, Finland
• Best Director: Paul Thomas Anderson, United States, "Punch-Drunk Love," and Im Kwon-taek, South Korea "Chihwaseon"
• Best Actor: Olivier Gourmet, Belgium, "The Son"
• Best Actress: Kati Outinen, Finland, "The Man Without a Past"
• Best Screenplay: "Sweet Sixteen," Paul Laverty, Britain
• Best short film: "Eso Utan," Peter Meszaros, Hungary
• Golden Camera (first-time director): "Bord de Mer," Julie Lopes-Curval, France
• Jury Prize: "Divine Intervention," Elia Suleiman, Palestinian
• Jury Prize for short film: "The Stone of Folly," Canada, Jesse Rosensweet
• Jury Prize for short film: "A very very silent film," India, Manish Jha
• Special 55th Anniversary Prize: "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore, United States

Cannes 2002; Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz And Pedro Almodovar to team up

Two of Spain's most successful Hollywood exports are set to star together in a new film directed by the country's most prominent director, Pedro Almodovar.

Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz look likely to make Tarantula, the story of a vengeful plastic surgeon. The story revolves around the surgeon's attempt to take revenge on his daughter's rapist by giving him a forced sex-change and is set around a decade in the future. The concept is based on a French novel.

Both Banderas and Cruz first came to international attention while working for Almodovar, in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother respectively. However, both have recently stuck to making English-language films and their return would be quite a coup for Spanish cinema.

Meanwhile it has been announced that Almodovar is to be the patron of the first European Cinema Heritage Week later this year. Its aim is to promote awareness of European cinema and will take place in November, in Copenhagen.

Speaking at Cannes, the European commissioner responsible for education and culture, Viviane Reding, said: "There is not just one 'European cinema', but several. In establishing European Cinema Heritage Week, I hope that the European public will discover the great films which are the key elements of our cultural diversity. I also see this week as an opportunity to underline the importance of conserving archives and to undertake initiatives throughout Europe for education in the visual image."

Cannes 2002; 'Irreversible' is Not a Winner But We will hear Lots About It!

In "Irreversible", sultry Italian actress Monica Bellucci is raped and beaten to a pulp by a pimp in a vivid nine-minute scene which has disturbed and repulsed audiences at the Cannes film festival.

Which makes it somewhat surprising that her father enjoyed the film.

"My father was there and he loved it," Bellucci, 33, told Reuters Television in an interview on Saturday, hours after Irreversible premiered at Cannes, where many guests walked out of the screening in disgust. Many, however, also praised it.

"I knew this scene was going to be shocking for him and I was thinking 'Oh my God' how is it going to be. It was hard for him to watch, but he loved it. He said: 'It's so beautiful, so strong what you did.'

"This is a film that people love or they hate, but it's good to have these kind of extremes."

Featuring stomach-churning violence as well as rape, and with a script which consists almost entirely of expletives against homosexuals and women, director Gaspar Noe's Irreversible was always expected to provoke outrage at Cannes.

Critics walked out of a screening on Thursday, describing it as "sick" and "gratuitous". Several special guests left the premier -- screened after midnight rather than the usual 8:00 or 10:00 p.m. -- and a woman had to be treated for nausea.

But the film has also garnered praise, with many impressed by its artistry, its clever camera work and its unrelenting, ultra-realist examination of the pure anger that drives a desire for revenge.

Poetry and beauty:

"At the beginning the film is very violent," said Bellucci, whose real-life husband Vincent Cassel plays her boyfriend in the film, a drug-crazed animal seeking to avenge his girlfriend's rape and disfigurement at the hands of the pimp.

"But then it becomes so poetic, so beautiful. There is this ecstasy almost, such a beautiful atmosphere," said Bellucci.

"You leave the film with something sweet, soft and beautiful. It's almost as if you forget the violence at the beginning."

Shown anti-chronologically -- the murder of the pimp first followed by sequences taking the viewer back through events -- the film opens in 'Rectum', a sado-masochist gay club, and ends with Bellucci happily discovering she is pregnant.

"It's not a film you can see twice right away. It's a film you can maybe see today and then again in three years' time. It's a film you need to digest," said the raven-haired actress.

Bellucci, who delighted audiences last year in Malena playing a woman whose astonishing beauty brings an town's entire male population to sexual arousal, has become Italy's hottest export and is tipped for international stardom.

Currently filming with Bruce Willis in Hawaii, she stars in the sequel to the sci-fi hit Matrix and has other U.S. projects in the works. But she doesn't want to lose her European roots.

"I'm a European and I know that here I can make movies like Irreversible, which I think are important movies, and which I couldn't make in the States because they can be very puritanical."

Asked if she felt roles like Irreversible might limit her career more than enhance it, she shrugged.

"I don't care. I do things because I want to do them," she said. "If I do things just for the money or my career, I wouldn't have done Irreversible. I did this film more as a step ahead for me personally as an actress."

Industry; HIT Entertainment And Gullane Have Resurrected Merger Talks

HIT Entertainment and Gullane have resurrected merger talks that could create one of the biggest producers of children's television outside the United States, a source close to the talks told Reuters on Sunday.

"There have been preliminary discussions," the source said, adding that the companies may make a statement about the possible 600 million pound ($871.8 million) merger on Monday.

Gullane, owner of Thomas the Tank Engine, rejected in 2000 an all-share offer of 750 pence per share from HIT, whose characters include Bob the Builder. The offer valued Gullane at around 225 million pounds.

The shares have more than halved in value since then, and closed on Friday at 375 pence, giving Gullane -- which also owns Sooty and Captain Pugwash -- a market capitalization of around 116 million pounds.

HIT's chief executive, Rob Lawes, told Reuters in March that the firm would consider further acquisitions following HIT's expansion into the U.S. last year with the $275 million acquisition of privately held Texas-based Lyrick Corp., which brought the well-established Barney character to the stable.