Uncle Boonmee grabs the the Palme d'Or for Thailand

A strikingly original Thai film has won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2010. Other decisions were less clear-cut.

The winner of the Palme d'Or at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival barely contains actors, let alone stars. Its lead cast members are, in their day jobs, a welder and a nightclub singer. Another principal role went to a woman chosen because she could swim particularly well (her part merely required her to bob about, so she might have been overqualified). It's slow, and to call it meandering would be to deprecate the narrative coherence and momentum of lowland streams. It's low-budget. Its special effects are among the hokiest to be found in cinemas since the 1950s. It is aggressively art-house - is, indeed, an adjunct to a previous art installation.

But Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the sixth film from the singular Thai talent Apichatpong Weerasethakul (he also goes by "Joe"), is a wonderful thing - sweet, gentle and mysterious, a celluloid phantasmagoria of supernatural visitations and everyday tendernesses where history's intrusions are made to seem as surreal as perhaps they always should be. There was not a more potently individual film on the competition slate, and the fact that Tim Burton's jury awarded it their highest prize comes as a very welcome endorsement of personal and imaginative filmmaking.

Burton told a press conference after the awards were announced on Sunday night: "The world is getting smaller and more westernised, more Hollywood-ised and this is a film where I felt I was watching from another country. It was using fantasy elements but in a way I'd never seen before, so I just felt it was like a beautiful, strange dream." A fellow juror, the director Shekhar Kapur, added that: "What comes across is incredible compassion, a great idea of eternity, of people who live in a context of formlessness and ceaselessness and eternal time."

To say very much more about the film would be to erode its spell in advance. Given that it now stands a chance at some sort of international distribution, you should see it yourself. You might not like it, of course. It has been a critics' favourite since it screened a few days ago, but it certainly wasn't a critics' favourite to win anything. Still, as Weerasethakul said: "We need diversity in the moving image."

If some of the other awards were harder to get behind from a critical standpoint, the consensus is that Burton's jury got its big decision triumphantly right. On the other hand it gave the Grand Prix, which corresponds to second place, to Xavier Beauvois's Des Hommes et Des Dieux, a severe, no-frills recreation of the kidnap and murder of a group of Cistercian monks by Algerian extremists. It is undoubtedly a serious piece of filmmaking - how could it be otherwise? - and was itself being tipped for the Palme.

However, Carlos, the five-hour-plus biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, drew admiring reviews on first screening and probably represents a more major achievement. And Mike Leigh's Another Year, which to my mind trumped the Beauvois for artistry, profundity and fun, ended up going home empty-handed, having spent the previous 10 or so days looking, to the general consensus, like the default winner overall.

In his acceptance speech, Beauvois thanked the monks themselves. One wonders to what extend the jury was really awarding it to them, too. The jury prize (third place), went to A Screaming Man, the fifth feature from the Chadian director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. It is another worthy winner, in every sense: a swimming-pool attendant sells his son out to the army and then spends the rest of the film consumed in silent (as opposed to screaming) remorse. The film is Chad's first in competition. Haroun called his award "an invitation to be part of the dance" of international cinema.

Javier Bardem looked like a shoo-in for the male acting award for his role as Uxbal in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful>. There aren't many actors who could preserve a sense of dramatic shape throughout the catalogue of miseries his character is subjected to - he's a gangmaster with a guilty conscience, a bipolar wife, vulnerable children, terminal cancer and the capacity to see dead people - but Bardem pulls it off magnificently. No surprise that he did indeed win the prize. Yet the jury still managed to stage an upset. In what Tim Burton referred to as "an unusual situation", it was split with Elio Germano, the Italian star of Daniele Luchetti's so-so family drama Our Life. Kate Beckinsale, another of the jury members, confessed to feelings of "slight nausea" at the thought of the films she wouldn't be able to honour. "We tried to invent more prizes," she said. Incidentally, Bardem was accompanied by his girlfriend Penelope Cruz, though she didn't walk the red carpet with him, gossip mavens may be interested to learn.

Best Actress went to Juliette Binoche for her part in Abbas Kiarostami's Copie Conforme (Certified Copy), if not for her starring role on this year's festival posters. Her only serious rival was Yun Jung-Hee, who starred in Poetry. "What a joy, what a joy, what a joy to work with you, Abbas," Binoche said as she accepted her prize.

She also made a point of holding up the nameplate from the empty chair of Jafar Panahi, who was invited to be a part of the jury but who is in jail in Iran and staging a hunger strike.

At the press conference after the awards, Binoche had further praise for Kiarostami, whom she had sought out as a collaborator even though, as she noted, he was based in Iran, spoke Farsi, didn't work with actors and was mainly known for shooting landscapes. "I didn't know what I wanted but I knew there was something there that was possible," she said. "And when I went in front of his camera, somehow it revealed a sort of knowledge, of understanding each other. I think that his camera is a goodwill camera."

The actor Mathieu Almaric took the prize for Best Director for his feature Tournée, in which a French television producer rounds up a group of American burlesque dancers for a tour of French ports. Almaric cast real burlesque dancers in the lead roles, and told the press: "I just stole their energy," which may be generous. There's an argument that the film works in spite of, rather than because of, its rather unschooled central performances. Nonetheless, Almaric's scuzzy and energetic naturalism has been roundly praised.

Meanwhile, Korea's Lee Chang-Dong took the screenwriting prize for a film he directed himself, Poetry. The film stars Yun Jung-hee as Yang Mi-ja, an elderly woman whose grandson rapes a young girl. The community seems content to sweep the crime under the carpet but Yang finds her conscience stirring under the influence of a poetry class she is taking. The jury for the Un Certain Regard sidebar was chaired by Claire Denis, and it gave its main prize to another Korean production: Hong Sang-Soo's Ha Ha Ha. The bittersweet tale of two friends comparing memories of their recent holidays and failing to realise that they were moving in identical circles all the time, it seemed a rather slight and anaemic exercise by the standards of some of its rivals. Still, Hong has passionate admirers and his new film marks no great departure from what he does best: talky comedies of male fecklessness.

The runner up for this sidebar was Daniel and Diego Vega's Octubre, while the acting prize went to Adela Sanchez, Eva Bianco and Victoria Raposo, the three leads in the Argentine medical drama Los Labios. This last award seemed wholly deserved: the film, a piece of elusive and sinister ultra-naturalism in which three medical workers go upcountry to do some much-needed healthcare outreach, rested entirely on their subtle, predominantly silent performances.

The Camera d'Or, a prize for the best first film, went to Michael Lowe's Año Bisiesto, a Mexico-based drama about a young journalist, played by Monica del Carmen, that was screening in the Director's Fortnight sidebar. Gael Garcia Bernal, the president of the Camera d'Or jury, apparently unwilling to get into specifics about the merits of this choice, explained that you had to see it yourself. Finally, the short film awards, decided by a jury chaired by the director Atom Egoyan, put a Franco-Turkish and a Danish film in first and second places respectively. The latter, <>Micky Bader, a documentary about a Danish centenarian who lived through the Nazi occupation, was moving and less obvious than might be suspected. The winner, Chienne d'Histoire, directed by Serge Avedikian, really was one of the most impressive films of the festival. An animation using tinted photographs and watercolours, it tells the true story of Istanbul's attempts, in 1910, to eradicate its stray dog population using the latest European techniques (the gas chamber). Finally, they exiled the animals to a desert island. The film is an exercise in supreme visual style full of pointedly troubling historical resonances. Watch out for it.