Cannes jury acknowledges split vote

Cannes jury president Emir Kusturica, the Sarajevo-born director, said that views on the panel diverged widely.

Cannes jury president Emir Kusturica, the Sarajevo-born director, said on Sunday that views on the panel diverged widely and complained that the quality of the contenders at the world's premier film festival was generally "not very high".

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As the 12-day festival wrapped up after bestowing the coveted Palme d'Or on the Belgian drama The Child, Kusturica said that the nine-member jury had nevertheless grown close while fighting for the films each had grown to love.

"We had a selection in which I think the average was not very high, but we had three or four movies that whatever we had done (in awarding the prizes) we wouldn't be ashamed," he said.

"We had a different opinion of which one could have won but any of them is so good that even though all (were) not unanimous, we're all happy with all these films."

He said the gritty picture The Child had won because it had managed "to produce the maximum out of the minimum, to be very consistent, to use more than cinema language and to have the audience with (it)".

French filmmaker Agnes Varda let a few secrets slip in terms of the preferences of the jury members, including the fact that Kusturica had not been a fan of his friend Jim Jarmusch's bittersweet road movie Broken Flowers.

The film, starring Bill Murray and Sharon Stone, claimed the Grand Prix award, the runner-up to the Palme d'Or.

Varda added that one of her personal favorites - Michael Haneke's French psychological thriller "Hidden", which was a top pick among critics - had gone over far less well with the jury than predicted throughout the festival.

"Each of us had maybe another champion that he would have loved to push. But you know where you are nine persons... then you have to come to films that we agree to love," she said.

Toni Morrison, a winner of the Nobel prize for literature, said she was thrilled with the level of debate during the deliberations over the prizes.

"I found the opinions very strong, which was the most exciting part for me. It was not a namby-pamby, sort of vaguely interested, already bought-and-sold jury," she said.

"There were real opinions and more importantly, they were well-articulated and well-argued so that one could be pursuaded from one position to another, or stand fast and then negotiate, which (as a) process is for me as exciting as any intellectual or artistic, creative process gets."

Bollywood actress Nandita Das said the irascible Kusturica had been a "sweet dictator" as head of the jury but that all of the members had held their own.

"It would have been a very wimpish experience had we all been like 'Oh, whatever is there is fine'. Each of us brought something to the table," she said.

After a US journalist criticized the acting and screenwriting awards given to Tommy Lee Jones's modern-day Western set on the Texas-Mexican frontier The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Morrison and Mexican actress Salma Hayek gave it a passionate defense.

"I loved it. Of course I identify and I recognize many aspects of it, but I think it's very universal -- it's a film about many different things, it's not just about borders," she said.

"It's political and it's very human and I really find the script extraordinary. I was so impressed with the script and the work of my colleague Tommy Lee Jones. I was very pleasantly surprised with the film."

Chinese director John Woo expressed his admiration for a tragic love story by Wang Xiaoshuai, Shanghai Dreams, which won the Jury Prize -- the only major award clinched among the five Asian contenders.

"The story really touched our hearts. We really cared about the story," he said.

"It isn't easy to make a movie like that in China -- he had many difficulties. It takes courage to tell a story like that."