BALLARAT's Michael Rowe has picked up the prestigious Cannes prize for best first film for a torrid tale shot and produced in Mexico.Leap Year is a sado-masochistic sex story set in a claustrophobic apartment in Mexico City.It was among 24 first films competing for the Camera d'Or award for best first feature movie."I want to thank the Mexican nation that created this story," he said on receiving the prize on Sunday.Rowe, who went to Brown Hill PS and Ballarat Grammar before studying at Melbourne's La Trobe University, has written several plays and lives in the Mexican capital.His film was screened in the parallel Directors' Fortnight section of the festival, which closed yesterday with a gala awards ceremony.Meanwhile, Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul scored a surprise win, bagging the festival's top prize - the Palme d'Or - for a surreal reincarnation tale, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.Apichatpong was an unexpected Palme d'Or winner after critics strongly tipped French director Xavier Beauvois, who took the runner-up Grand Prix for Of Gods and Men, about Catholic monks threatened by Islamists in Algeria."This is like another world for me... this is surreal," Apichatpong told a packed hall after receiving the Palme from the head of the festival jury, US film-maker Tim Burton, who is likewise known for his fantastical storylines.The 39-year-old Thai director thanked "the spirits... in Thailand that surrounded us" while making the film, a hypnotic meditation on the afterlife featuring a humanoid monkey ghost and a princess having sex with a catfish.It was only the sixth Asian film to win the top prize at Cannes in seven decades of the festival, and the first for more than a decade. Five Asian entries had competed for the top prize this year.Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who plays a good-hearted terminally-ill hustler in Biutiful by Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, shared the best actor award with Italy's Elio Germano, star of family drama Our Life.And France's Juliette Binoche was named best actress for her role as an unhappy art dealer in Certified Copy by Iran's Abbas Kiarostami.