The White Ribbon, a devastating drama by Austrian director Michael Haneke about abuse and violence in a small German village on the eve of the First World War, was chosen Sunday as the top film at the Cannes Film Festival.

"I feel good, of course," said Haneke. "This is the best prize you can get in cinema, so I'm delighted."

Isabelle Huppert, who headed the festival jury and has made two movies with Haneke, saluted his humanity, which she said "sometimes takes a strange path, which makes it more interesting, because it goes so far into the human soul."

The movie - a subtle examination of the roots of fascism that also won the festival's Ecumenical Prize for its humanist content - was a surprise winner of the Palme d'Or. A French film, the prison drama A Prophet, had been the pick of many critics here: it won the Grand Prix, or second prize. Asked about not winning the Palme, director Jacques Audiard said, "What is the problem? Isn't this a good prize?"

There were plenty of bigger surprises, however, including the choice of Charlotte Gainsbourg as best actress for her role as a grieving mother who attacks both her husband and herself - the latter with a pair of rusty scissors - in the controversial Lars Von Trier film Antichrist. That movie, which divided critics, had earlier won a special anti-award from the Ecumenical Prize jury for its misogyny.

"I admire everything he did with this film," Gainsbourg said of Von Trier. "He is an artist." She was asked about the rumours that Antichrist would be edited for distribution, with some of its more extreme shots removed. "I don't know what the film will be like without those shots," she said.

The best actor award went to Austrian actor Christoph Waltz for his role as a clever (and multilingual) Nazi who dominates the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds. Waltz - who is the real star of the movie, even more than the more familiar names in the cast like Brad Pitt - thanked Tarantino. "You gave me my vocation back," he said.

The best director prize was also a shocker: Filipino filmmaker Brillante Mendoza won for Kinatay, a drama about a stripper who is abducted, raped and tortured to death by a group of drug dealers. The movie was panned by many critics at Cannes for its subject matter and unrelenting grimness, and there were boos among the press when Mendoza's name was announced.

"I think it's one of the most powerful films in the selection, one of the most original, and one of the films that really created a style for the subject matter," said jury member Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director. Added jury member Hanif Kureishi, a screenwriter: "It's not a dating film, this film." He said sometimes good art is difficult, although he acknowledged it is not a movie he would like to see again.

The awards reflected a festival that began with a lighthearted adventure, the animated Pixar movie Up, but soon became a compendium of scalpings (in Inglourious Basterds) and genital mutilation (in Antichrist). "Some of the films were very, very long, and some were very, very weird as well," said Kureishi. "I saw things I had never seen before in my life in some of these films."

The Cannes jury awarded a special lifetime achievement prize for "exceptional contribution to the history of cinema," to French master Alain Renais, the 87-year-old director of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. His competition entry, Wild Grass, was a surreal drama about a man who finds a lost wallet and becomes involved with the woman who lost it.

In all, nine of the 20 films in competition won awards.

The jury prize, Cannes' third-place award, was shared by British director Andrea Arnold for her social-realist drama Fish Tank, about a troubled young girl whose life is changed when her single mother finds a new boyfriend, and Park Chan-Wook whose Thirst was a horror film about a priest who becomes a vampire.