Moore leaves Cannes with the Gold

On Saturday, president of the jury Quentin Tarantino announced that Michael Moore's controversial documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," had won the Palme d'Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and one of the greatest honors in the film industry. The movie attacks Bush's response to the September 11th attacks and his motives for the Iraq War.

In some ways, the award was predictable. After its screening, the audience gave the film an unprecedented twenty-minute standing ovation, and it received a special critics' prize the day before the awards ceremony. However, the Cannes festival generally does not favor non-fiction work, and "Fahrenheit 9/11" is the first documentary to win the Palme d'Or since 1956.

Moore seemed to see the win not only as an artistic victory but also a political one, pointing out that four of the jurors were Americans. However, Tarantino has stated that the film was not chosen for its political views, and that the members of the jury differ in their political beliefs. Moore joked about the film's distribution problems, telling the audience that they had just found a distributor in Albania, so "every country but one can see it." Miramax is currently looking for a third party distributor for the United States release after their parent company Disney refused to allow the anti-Bush film to be released under the Miramax name.

Moore later joked that he had forgotten to thank President Bush for the funniest lines in the movie. When asked what he believed Bush's reaction to his film's success would be, Moore answered, "He is probably choking on a pretzel or something."