A harrowing film about illegal abortion in Communist-era Romania beat 21 movies by well-known directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Ethan and Joel Coen, and Wong Kar-wai to win the Cannes Film Festival's top prize Sunday, relates Reuters.

Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's low-budget film, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," depicts the horrors a student goes through to ensure her friend can have a secret abortion.

Mungiu, who was awarded the Palme d'Or by actress Jane Fonda, said he didn't even have enough money to shoot the film just six months ago. He hoped the win would inspire other "small filmmakers from small countries."

"You don't necessarily need a big budget and big stars to tell a story that everyone will listen to," said 39-year-old Mungiu, the first Romanian to win Cannes' top prize.

The prize for best director went to American Julian Schnabel for his French-language film "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," based on a memoir by a French magazine editor who became paralyzed after a stroke and learned to write again by painstakingly blinking his eyelid.

German writer and director Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven," a German-Turkish cross-cultural tale of loss, mourning and forgiveness, won the prize for best screenplay.



Publication date: 28 May 2007   

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