CANNES, France — Director Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," a disturbing film loosely based on the Columbine shooting, won top prize at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.

Van Sant, who also won for best director, looked stunned when he accepted the Palme d'Or.

"Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart. For years, I tried to bring one of my films to the Cannes festival," Van Sant said. "Vive la France!"

Van Sant cast real high school students, not professional actors, in the film, and asked them to improvise their lines. The movie starts out showing an ordinary day at school, with students gossiping in the cafeteria, playing football or working in the photography lab. At the end, two students go on a shooting spree in the hallways.

Van Sant was the first American to win the Palme d'Or since Quentin Tarantino did for "Pulp Fiction" in 1994. He has never had a film compete at Cannes before, though "To Die For," starring Nicole Kidman, showed here out of competition in 1995.

The awards capped a 12-day Cannes lineup that was widely regarded as the weakest in recent memory, and "Elephant," though well received, was something of a surprise for the top prize.

Many critics had favored Lars von Trier's "Dogville," a challenging, dark, three-hour drama starring Kidman and set in Depression-era America. The movie did not win any prizes. Also overlooked was Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," a crime drama about three childhood friends brought together again by a murder.

Last year, Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" won the Palme d'Or. Polanski went on to win an Oscar for best director and Adrien Brody, the main character, won the best actor Oscar.

The Turkish film "Uzak" (Distant), won the Grand Prize, or second place, this year. The slow-moving film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan is about a jobless man from the countryside who irritates his sophisticated city cousin by moving into his apartment.

Uzak's two stars, Muzaffer Ozdemir and the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, shared the award for best actor. They played the two cousins — both lonely and alienated, but unable to become friends.

Toprak died in a car crash shortly after learning that the film was selected to show in Cannes; Ozdemir is an architect by profession, not an actor.

The screenwriting prize went to Denys Arcand for the critically acclaimed French-Canadian film "The Barbarian Invasions," about a womanizing university professor who confronts death with humor and sharp intelligence. The movie, which Arcand also directed, seemed to touch the most hearts in Cannes, and had many viewers wiping away tears.

Marie-Josee Croze, who plays a young drug addict recruited to supply the dying professor with heroin to ease his pain, won the award for best actress.

The Jury Prize went to "At Five in the Afternoon," by 23-year-old directing prodigy Samira Makhmalbaf of Iran. The movie — her third at Cannes — is about a spirited young Afghan who dreams of becoming her country's first woman president. Many of its scenes have a haunting beauty, showing the country's ruined palaces and rocky deserts.

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"Reconstruction," by Denmark's Christoffer Boe, won the Camera d'Or for the best film by a first-time director. The prize for best short film went to Australia's Glendyn Ivin for "Cracker Bag," about a girl who saves her pocket change to buy firecrackers.

It was the second year in a row that the Columbine shootings got lots attention at Cannes, but "Elephant" offered a different take on school violence than last year's "Bowling for Columbine" from Michael Moore, which was also well received.

Moore's film searched for the roots of violence in America by looking at everything from school shootings to racism and the National Rifle Association. Van Sant doesn't offer any reasons for school violence; he just presents it for the viewers to ponder.

While the movie is fiction, some details were lifted straight from the Columbine massacre on April 20, 1999, when gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives. In one scene of "Elephant," one of the young killers stops in an empty cafeteria and sips from a glass — an image inspired by one captured on Columbine's surveillance cameras.

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