The Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media presented its top honors Sunday to the film Time Out (L'emploi du Temps) by French director Laurent Cantet, according to AFP.
The film, a fact-based drama, tells the tale of an unemployed man's quest for dignity through an elaborate deceit about a job in Switzerland.
The story of the cheat, who for 18 years pretended to work for a UN agency before killing his entire family, takes its inspiration from the 1993 killing spree of Jean-Claude Romand, who killed his parents, wife and children as they were about to learn about his double life.
Romand had pretended, for nearly two decades, to be working for the Geneva-based World Health Organization.
Costarring in the film are Aurélien Recoing and Karin Viard. It was scripted by Robin Campillo and Cantet.
The prize for best screenplay went to Platform by Chinese director Jia Zhang-Ke, a film about one of the hit songs Chinese youth in the early 1980s were forced to listen to in secret.
The events of Platform take place in 1979 in the small remote town in China. The film follows, over a period of ten years, the trials and tribulations of an official theatrical troupe which soon converts itself to rock, said AFP.
Minliang and his friends experience a series of artistic and romantic adventures against a backdrop of revolutionary deception and privatization.
The jury's special prize went to Canadian Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk for his film Atanarjuat The Fast Runner.
Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) is the first feature film written, produced, directed and acted by Inuit. It is based on a legend about a young man from a poor family who improves his lot by becoming a good hunter and a fast runner.
Nelofer Pazira took the prize for best film role in the Iranian film Kandahar directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Kandahar tells the story of Nafas, a young Afghan journalist, who took refuge in Canada. She receives a desperate letter from her younger sister, in Afghanistan, who has decided to put an end to her life before the eclipse.
Nafas fled from her country during the civil war with the Taliban, but now decides to go back to Kandahar to give her sister's assistance and tries to enter from the Iranian-Afghan border – Albawaba.com
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