As it has in the past, the Cannes film festival ended with critical jeers and debate over the choice of winner for the Palme d'Or, the coveted award for the best film over the fortnight long fest. Director Roman Polanski scooped the award for The Pianist, a holocaust drama about a brilliant jewish musician from the Warsaw ghetto who escapes death with the help of a sympathetic nazi officer. The film, which marks a return to form for Polanski, is on a deeply personal subject - the director spent his childhood hiding from the Nazis in Poland. Nevertheless, it was also considered the most conventional of new features showcased in the Cannes competition and to many was a surprise winner.

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A popular black comedy from Finn director Aki Kaurismaki, A Man without a Past (Mies Vailla Menneisyytta), picked up the Grand Prix award (the second prize awarded by the jury) and also Best Actress for Kati Outinen. The Best Actor award went to Olivier Gourmet, for his role in Dardenne brothers' The Son (Le Fils), a film similar in its bleak tone to their 1999 Palme D'Or winner Rosetta.

The jury, which included chair David Lynch, Sharon Stone and Michelle Yeoh, chose to share the best directing award between South Korean Im kwon-Taek for biopic Chihwaseon and Paul Thomas Anderson for Punch-Drunk Love, a dark romantic comedy that has impressed even erstwhile critics of its star comedian Adam Sandler.

Julie Lopes-Curval took the prize for best first feature for a character-based ensemble piece, Seaside (Bord de Mer). Paul Laverty, who also wrote My Name Is Joe, won the best screenplay award for Sweet Sixteen - this is Ken Loach in familiar territory with a gritty working class drama starring teenage Glaswegian non-actors.

Moore Award

The political theme was continued with the awarding of The Jury Prize to director Elia Suleiman for his Palestinian-set Divine Intervention and a Special Jury Award to Michael Moore's all-out attack on America's love-affair with guns, Bowling for Columbine.

The first documentary to be entered in competition since a Jacques Cousteau piece 46 years ago, Bowling for Columbine had a rapturous ten-minute standing ovation at its public screening. The documentary features interviews with rockstar Marilyn Manson, in lucid form, and Hollywood monolith/National Rifle Association spokesman, Charlton Heston. Moore revealed that after being stonewalled by Heston's agents, to his amazement, he eventually got an interview by following a cheesey "star" map which included Heston's L.A. home.

Star quotient

Although the business of buying and selling films was said to be more muted than in previous years, there was an array of stars at what many still consider the most glamorous festival in the world.

Woody Allen, making his first appearance at Cannes, opened the proceedings with his new comedy, Hollywood Ending. "The two biggest myths about me are that I'm an intellectual, because I wear these glasses, and that I'm an artist because my films lose money," he quipped to a receptive audience. Woody is big in France.

Pierce Brosnan surfaced for the MTV/James Bond party at Pierre Cardin's villa and George Lucas joined the gathering of auteurs to evangelise about the future of digital cinema. The future is digital projection, George told the media from around the world.

Ganging up on Day Lewis

Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio trode the red carpet with director Martin Scorsese for a twenty minute preview of the forthcoming, already-delayed Gangs of New York, a film about the battle for supremacy between rival gangs in early New York. Obvious, really.

Scorsese explained how they persuaded Daniel Day Lewis, who had been working as a cobbler in Florence, to come out of acting "retirement" to play the role of violent gangleader "Bill the Butcher". Scorsese, DiCaprio and producer Harvey Weinstein took him out for a meal and told him "We love you".

Jack Nicholson was heaped with more praise, as if he needed it, and was unlucky not to take an award back across the water for his starring role in About Schmidt, a satire in which he plays a sad insurance salesman facing a late-life crisis.

Mixed up

The latest from bad boy director Gaspe Noe, Reversible, so-called because it is told backwards, has shocked audiences with its graphic depiction of murder, rape and sodomy. Star Monica Bellucci (Malena) probably breathed a sigh of relief that her father enjoyed it. But twenty people who apparently fainted during the premiere, had to be administered oxygen before they could breath normally.

Meanwhile, Brit director Mike Leigh's latest, All or Nothing, a council estate drama starring Timothy Spall as a mournful taxi driver in a dysfunctional family, was also welcomed as "classic" Leigh.

Added to this mix were the enthralling digital experiments of Kiarostami's 10, a series of back-of-a-car interviews with Iranian women, and Russian Ark (Russki Kovcheg), one continuous, unedited take in St. Petersburg's Hermitage museum.

It is clear that this was a festival characterised by strong independent visions. That controversy and debate surrounds the main award-winner can only be a good thing.

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