At the closing ceremony of the 61st Cannes Film Festival on Sunday, the red carpet was overrun by teenagers when the French film The Class directed by Laurent Cantet won the Palme d’Or.

This documentary-inflected drama follows a year in the life of a French schoolteacher working in a tough multicultural section of Paris, chron.com reports. Based on a best-selling autobiographical novel by Francois Begaudeau, who plays the main character, The Class is given great life by the performances of the nonprofessional actors playing the students. Cantet brought them onstage with him to accept the prize, and they brought the entire Palais des Festivals to its feet.

The president of the jury, Sean Penn, said the award for The Class was one of two unanimous verdicts. The other was the prize for best actor, given to Benicio Del Toro, who played the title role in Steven Soderbergh’s Che. Other winners included Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, two-time Palme d’Or recipients, who took the screenplay award for Le Silence de Lorna, about the struggles of a young Albanian immigrant in Belgium. Sandra Corveloni, who played a working-class mother in Sao Paulo in Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ Linha de Passe, won the best-actress award, which the directors accepted on her behalf. The directing award went to Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Three Monkeys.

Both the grand prix and the jury prize went to Italian films: the grand prix to Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah, a brutally realistic examination of organized crime in Naples; and the jury prize to Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino’s portrait of the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. The Camera d’Or for best first feature went to Steve McQueen’s Hunger.

The jury conferred two special prizes, a combination of lifetime achievement award and acknowledgment of new work, on Catherine Deneuve and Clint Eastwood.