"My kingdom may be small but at least I'm the king," boasts the despised landlord at the heart of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Turkish drama Winter Sleep. In crowning the film with the all-important Palme d'Or award, the Cannes film festival laid on a coronation which suggested that the kingdom may be growing.

"This is a great surprise for me," said the 55-year-old Ceylan, who has been a favourite of the Cannes selectors since his acclaimed drama Uzak took the 2002 jury prize. "This year is the 100th year of Turkish cinema and that is a good coincidence, I think."

Winter Sleep is the first Turkish film to win the Palme since Yilmaz Guney's political saga Yol, back in 1982. On accepting the award, Ceylan dedicated his prize to the "young people" caught up in his nation's ongoing political unrest and to the more than 300 workers who were killed in the recent Soma mining disaster.

Winter Sleep stars the onetime EastEnders star Haluk Bilginer as Aydin, a wealthy retired actor who dreams of playing God in a remote community in rural Anatolia. Ceylan's tale is a brooding, knotty psychological drama, doffing its cap to the plays of Anton Chekhov and running nearly three-and-a-half hours in length as Aydin stumbles, by degrees, towards a self-knowledge. The director had been the bookies' favourite coming in to the festival and yet Winter Sleep appeared to split the critics when it screened early in the festival. Where many hailed the film as a revelation, others regarded it as an endurance test.

Happily for Ceylan, the judges were on his side. "I could have happily stayed there for another couple of hours," insisted jury president Jane Campion. She added: "If I had the guts to be as honest about his characters as this director is, I'd be very proud of myself."

"We all felt it was an incredible spiritual film with terrific performances," added director Nicolas Winding Refn, who served on the jury. "I cried at the end. I was taken into another world."

In building to their Palme d'Or announcement, the jury threw consolation prizes to a number of other contenders. Julianne Moore was named best actress for her performance as a demented Hollywood diva in David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, while Britain's Timothy Spall won the best actor prize for his grunting, growling masterclass as marine painter JMW Turner in Mike Leigh's period drama Mr Turner.

For Spall, 57, the victory had involved a last-minute dash in order to reach the ceremony on time. "About four hours ago I was in north Holland with my arm up a pipe full of grease on my boat," he explained ruefully. "I have had a wash since then."

Spall had previously acted in Leigh's bittersweet drama Secrets and Lies, which won the Palme d'Or back in 1996. At the time he had been unable to attend the closing night ceremony, because he was undergoing treatment for leukemia. The actor went on to thank his director, cast and crew. "Most of all I thank God that I'm still here and alive," he said.

Elsewhere, Italian director Alice Rohrwacher took the runner-up Grand Prix award for her warm-hearted rites-of-passage drama The Wonders. The American film-maker Bennett Miller was named best director for his pungent, fact-based thriller Foxcatcher, which casts Steve Carrell as a twitchy, insecure billionaire who buys himself a wrestling team. Russia's Andrei Zvyaginstev picked up the screenplay prize for his epic tragedy Leviathan - a picture some observers had tipped as a Palme d'Or winner.

In a rare move, Cannes judges decided to split the jury prize between Mommy, a boisterous Oedipal comedy from Canada's 25-year-old Xavier Dolan, and the abstract, oblique Goodbye to Language from the 83-year-old provocateur Jean-Luc Godard.

At the podium, a tearful Dolan paid tribute to Campion. The jury president remains the festival's only female Palme d'Or winner, taking the prize for The Piano in 1993. "The Piano was the first film that I watched that truly defined who I am," Dolan told her. "It made me want to write films for beautiful women with soul and will and strength. To even stand on the same stage as you is extraordinary."

At the end of a festival that was widely judged to be solid rather than spectacular, the Cannes organisers brought the curtain down with gusto, if not always with efficiency. Quentin Tarantino danced with Uma Thurman on the red carpet outside the Palais, while the live feed of the ceremony failed in the neighbouring Debussy cinema, sparking mass uproar among the gathered delegates. The 67th Cannes film festival bowed out to a deafening blend of cheers and hoots, applause and whistles, delight and fury. Fans of the event would not want it any other way.



• Gallery: how the night unfolded

• Peter Bradshaw's take

Reviews of the winners

• Winter Sleep

• The Wonders

• Mommy

• Goodbye to Language

• Foxcatcher

• Mr Turner

• Maps to the Stars

• Leviathan