Two Canadian films have won prizes at the 61st Cannes film festival.
Atom Egoyan's Adoration, a film about a teenaged boy who tells a false story to his class about his Arab father that unleashes a debate on the Internet, won the Ecumenical Jury Prize for promoting spiritual values. The jury commended Egoyan's film for encouraging viewers to "re-evaluate existing clichés about the Other or that which is foreign in our own culture and religion."
Egoyan won the same award in 1997 for The Sweet Hereafter.
Adoration is also in competition for the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, which will be awarded on Sunday night.
Quebec's Denis Villeneuve, whose short film Next Floor was shown as part of the Critics' Week short-film category, won the Canal Plus Grand Prize. The film is a surreal depiction of a party of aristocrats gorging on meat in the midst of a collapsing building.
On Saturday evening, the Un Certain Regard jury, under Turkish- German director Fatih Akim, gave prizes to five films in the 20-film sidebar to the main competition. The winning film was the Kazakstani comedy Tulpan, about a young man trying to start a new life as a shepherd after serving in the navy, but first he must marry - which proves difficult because his potential bride doesn't like his large ears.
Runner-up jury awards went to Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata; James Toback's documentary Tyson, about troubled boxer Mike Tyson; the seniors-in-love story, Cloud 9, from Germany's Andreas Dresen; and Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog, a drama about child soldiers in Africa.
Another jury, the International Federation of Film Critics, gave out three awards to films in three different programs, with Kornel Mandruzco's Delta getting the nod from the Palme d'Or competition candidates; British filmmaker Steve McQueen's Hunger winning in the Un Certain Regard; and the Belgian director Bouli Lanner taking the prize in the Directors' Fortnight category for his offbeat road movie, Eldorado.
Earlier, Eldorado won two prizes in the Cannes Directors' Fortnight