The movie mood at Cannes this year was bleak, mirroring concerns sweeping the world.

Of the 22 films competing for Cannes' precious Palme d'Or to be awarded Sunday, only six stuck strictly outside the boundaries of the socially relevant to focus on the strictly personal.

Poverty, rape, organised crime, political corruption, police bungling, and how history deals with such issues — all came under the cinematic spotlight during the 12-day orgy of film, 14 to 25 May.

Setting the tone for the 2008 reality bites, the world's largest cinema showcase offered the red-carpet opening to a film highlighting a near-apocalypse and a government's inability to deal with a disaster — "Blindness" by Fernando Meirelles.

"It's as if civilisation was built on a thin layer of ice that could crack at any moment," Meirelles said as images of Asia's devastating disasters travelled the world. "It's a metaphor on all the ills of the 20th century."

"Pretty relentlessly grim"

As the following films rolled out one-by-one with a hard-hitting dark look at life, rain-clouds hovered, business was slow for the 10,000 industry types in town, and drug- and assault-tainted celebs grabbed the headlines.

The films were "pretty relentlessly grim," said Kirk Honeycutt, chief critic at Hollywood Reporter. "For a lot of us critics it's been a tough way to go."

The struggle of a single mother battling to recover a snatched child was dramatised in Clint Eastwood's hotly-awaited thriller 'The Exchange', as well as in a gripping Argentine tale set in a women's prison, 'Lion's Den' by Pablo Trapero.

A graphic rape scene of a girl by her mother's lover featured in Hungary's 'Delta', while 'Serbis' from the Philippines played out the sleazy goings-on at a gay porn movie theatre in poverty-struck Manila.

Significantly, a hot ticket for the top prize came in documentary format, an animated anti-war Israeli movie, 'Waltz With Bashir', in which the director seeks out the truth about Beirut's 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, with a little help from Sigmund Freud.

Non-fiction all the rage

In fact, non-fiction seemed all the rage at Cannes 2008 — either as authentic documentary, or make-believe fictionalised documentary.

One of the most-awaited movies, 'Che' by 'Ocean's' director Steven Soderbergh, was a case in point.

Casting Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro as the revolutionary hero, backed by an all-star Latin American cast, Soderbergh dished up a marathon clocking up four hours plus that was meticulously researched over nine years and shot and edited to hit the screen as a documentary lookalike.

France's most warmly-received entry 'The Class' used a real teacher and young non-professional actors in a film on life in a Paris schoolroom.

Like Soderbergh, Italy's two acclaimed entries on the mafia and political corruption ('Gomorrah' and 'Il Divo') were fiction films made over as fact-finders.

In '24 City', a well-received documentary on China's fast pace of change seen through 50 years in the life of an aeronautics company, director Zia Zhangke took another option — throwing in a few actors to pepper up his interviews with real-life workers.

Drugs, assault and illicit sex

High on the must-see list of films featured at Cannes this year too were documentaries on the rise and fall of sporting icons Diego Maradona and Mike Tyson, as well as film-maker Roman Polanski — VIPs associated with drugs, assault and illicit sex.

And taking time for a spot of navel-gazing reassessment of its own, the festival chose to close the event on Sunday with a satire about the film industry by Barry Levinson that includes a hilarious send-up of the Cannes filmfest.

"We've got to do the opposite of the Academy that gives out the Oscars, where manipulation and very good marketing are rewarded," said US actor turned director Sean Penn, who headed the nine-strong jury handing out the Palme.

It had been a very good year for films at Cannes, said politically minded Penn. But he did regret "there weren't a few more comedies in competition".

AFP