CANNES, France - Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda won the Palme d'Or at Cannes on Saturday for Shoplifters, a critically acclaimed family drama with unguessable plot twists.

The award, to a director who has won prizes at the festival before, defied speculation that the Palme might go to a female director, with three strong contenders in a year when the Hollywood sex scandal was the talk of the town.

Italian actress Asia Argento, who has accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, said there were abusers in the audience who had yet to be outed.

Argento said Weinstein raped her during the Cannes festival in 1997 when she was 21. "This festival was his hunting ground," Argento said in a speech ahead of the prizegiving.

After the ceremony, Cate Blanchett who headed the jury of five women and four men, said: "Women and men alike on the jury would love to see more female directorial voices represented," adding that it had been "bloody hard" to select a winner.

"But in the end I think we were completely bowled over by how intermeshed the performances were with the directorial vision," she said of Shoplifters.

The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, went to Spike Lee's satire BlacKkKlansman, based on the true story of a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.

Another accusation

Meanwhile, an actress has lodged a complaint of rape against French film director Luc Besson, judicial sources said on Saturday, the latest in a string of sexual abuse allegations in the wake of the Weinstein scandal.

The filmmaker's lawyer said he categorically denied the claims, calling them "fantasist accusations", adding that the complainant was someone he knew "towards whom he has never behaved inappropriately".

Police in Paris opened an investigation after the actress accused the 59-year-old The Big Blue, Nikita and Leon director of raping her, the judicial sources said.

A "complaint has been made for acts qualifying as rape by the plaintiff which happened Thursday night into Friday in Paris", they said, adding that police were investigating.

News of the allegation emerged shortly before the closing ceremony in Cannes.

One source close to the investigation said Besson was out of the country and had not been questioned.

Reuters - AFP