Actress Aishwarya Rai blowing a kiss at the opening night.

2006 Cannes Film Festival Ends with Loach's `Wind That Shakes the Barley' on top.

Ken Loach's ``The Wind That Shakes the Barley,'' about the Irish struggle for independence from Britain in the 1920s, won the Palme d'Or award for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival today, ending the world's best-known cinema competition.

``Flanders,'' directed by Bruno Dumont, won the Grand Prix award.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu of Mexico was voted best director by a nine-member jury chaired this year by Chinese film maker Wong Kar Wai. Inarritu's ``Babel'' is a patchwork of three stories involving families from three continents whose lives accidentally overlap. Inarritu's previous film include ``Amores Perros''.
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The best actor award went to the entire male cast of the French-Moroccan-Algerian film ``Indigenes''. The film, set in 1943, deals with three North African youths who join the French army to fight the Nazis in World War II.

All the female performers of Pedro Almodovar's ``Volver,'' among them Penelope Cruz and Carmen Maura, were awarded the best actress prize. In the Spaniard's film, a dead mother makes a comeback in the lives of her two grown-up daughters.

Almodovar, 54, received the best script prize for ``Volver.''

In this year's festival 20 films vied for the Palme d'Or.

Over an 11-day period, 55 movies from 30 countries were screened, 48 of them world premieres, including ``The Da Vinci Code''.

Last year, the Palme d'Or went to ``L'Enfant'' (``The Child'') by the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. Jim Jarmusch's ``Broken Flowers'' won the runner-up Grand Prix.

The first Cannes film festival took place in 1946. Among the earliest award winners were directors Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray. - Bloomburg - ArtsyStuff Magazine