May 27, 2008 CANNES, France — Benicio Del Toro won the best-actor prize Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival for “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour-plus epic about Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara.
Presented as two films, “Che” follows Guevara and Fidel Castro’s triumphant guerrilla campaign to overthrow Cuba’s government in the late 1950s and Guevara’s downfall and execution after trying to foment a similar rebellion in Bolivia in the 1960s.
The win was a unanimous decision among the nine-member Cannes jury, said Sean Penn, who headed the panel and who co-starred with Del Toro in “21 Grams.”
“I’d like to dedicate this to the man himself, Che Guevara,” said Del Toro.
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