Cannes, France, May 26: Small films made the big time at the Cannes Film Festival this year, with family-style productions from Iran, Turkey and even Afghanistan making waves and sweeping the awards. Even the big winner at Cannes, "Elephant" by US director Gus Van Sant, was made on peanuts by Hollywood standards at three million dollars and used amateurs to play high school students ahead of a gun massacre just like that at Columbine. Turkey's lone entry was about loneliness and was made in a good deal of solitude, with director Nuri Bilge Ceylan doing most of the work and family and friends chipping in with the rest. But "Distant" ("Uzak") scooped one of the festival's top honours, the runner-up grand prize, as well as a joint best actor for the two lead roles in the haunting film "About Emptiness" -- Muzaffer Ozdemir and the late Mehmet Emin Toprak, killed in a car accident in December.

"The two were my friends," Ceylan said. "They've both acted in all my films."


The partly autobiographical film by the 44-year-old director and photographer is largely a tete-a-tete between a weary intellectual whose private life and everyday habits are upset by the arrival of a jobless relative. Ceylan not only wrote and directed the shoestring budget film but was also behind the camera and at the editing table. His wife and mother both have small roles in the film and the relative was his cousin in real life.

Bureau Report