Van Sant's Elephant

Gus Van Sant won the Cannes film festival's coveted Palme d'Or award Sunday for Elephant, a film that tracks the lives of actual U.S. students to see how they cope with shootings and violence at school. Van Sant previously directed such films as Good Will Hunting and To Die For. He also received the award for best direction at the Festival.

Elephant uses non-actor children from Van Sant's home town of Portland, Oregon, and improvised lines to paint an impressionistic picture of everyday high school life that turns to tragedy when two students go on a shooting spree.

Another film touted as a top winner was French-Canadian The Barbarian Invasions, which ended up winning best screenplay and best actress for Marie-Josee Croze, who plays a drug addict who supplies the dying hero with heroin to ease his pain.

Two awards also went to Turkish film Uzak (Distant), a moving study of how a man's home life is upset when a jobless cousin moves in. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the runner-up Grand Prix and amateur players Muzaffer Ozdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak jointly won best actor, an honor that goes posthumously to Toprak, Ceylan's cousin, after he died in a car accident the day after learning Uzak was shortlisted for Cannes.

Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf, just 23, received her second Jury Award in three years for Five in the Afternoon, her portrayal of life in Afghanistan since the Taliban fell.