A PERIOD FILM about life in a Texas town in the 1950s has scooped the main prize, the Palme d’Or, at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Terrence Malick’s film ‘The Tree of Life’, starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, traces the tale of Jack (Penn) as he moves from childhood into a lonely adult who grows to appreciate the natural beauty of the ‘eternal scheme’ of life on Earth.

Of greater interest at the closing night in Cannes, though, was Kirsten Dunst’s award for Best Actress in ‘Melancholia’ – Lars von Trier’s film which had been overshadowed by his disastrous press conference last week in which the director admitted holding Nazi sympathies. That press conference saw von Trier banned from the festival.

Jean Dujardin took the Best Actor award for his role in ‘The Artist’, Michel Hazanavicius’s film about a declining male actor struggling to retain his Hollywood profile as the silent movie era gives way to the ‘talkies’.

The festival Grand Prize was shared between ‘Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’, by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and ‘The Kid with the Bike’ by Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.