Heartbeats takes Sydney Film Fest prize
A quirky film about unrequited love has won the Sydney Film Festival $60,000 prize.
Heartbeats is 21-year-old Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan's second feature length film.
It explores what happens to a friendship when two people are infatuated with the same young man.
Festival director Clare Stewart says it has been a favourite with festival audiences.
"Heartbeats is just this wonderful, playful, inventive, witty and quite emotionally courageous film," she said.
"It's very sophisticated in how it uses film language, and also an incredibly enjoyable take on the romantic kind of genre."
Sydney Film Festival jury president Jan Chapman also gave the film a glowing review.
"With a witty and insightful script and strikingly playful use of cinematic language, the jury found Heartbeats to be a boldly truthful and compassionate observation of one of the great crippling foibles of human nature - the hopeless crush," she said.
Dolan's first movie J'ai Tue Ma Mere (I Killed My Mother), which explored a mother-son bond, won three awards at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
Heartbeats, which premiered at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival last month, was one of 12 official competition films at Sydney.
The festival's jury also gave honourable mentions to two films: Australian film Wasted On The Young by director Ben Lucas; and How I Ended This Summer by Russian director Alexei Popogrebsky.
The jury deciding the winner of the $60,000 prize was made up of Chapman, an Australian producer, Hong Kong director Yonfan, Australian director Shirley Barrett, British director Lucy Walker and Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper.
The Sydney Film Festival's official competition is only in its third year and was set up to reward "courageous and audacious filmmaking".
The festival closed on Monday with the Australian premiere of The Kids Are All Right starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska.
- ABC/Reuters