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| The movie "Dam street" |
The only woman director taking part in this year's Asian Film Festival at theFrenchseaside resort ofDeauvillewon the event's top award, the coveted Lotus D'Or.
China's Li Yu, 32, won the prize for "Dam Street", a drama centred on the life of a young Chinese woman who falls pregnant as a high school student in a small, conservative Chinese town in the early 1980s.
'Dam Street' is Li's second feature film and has already been shown at a number of other leading cinema events including Austria's Biennale and the Toronto and Rotterdam film festivals.
Li was not present in Deauville to receive her award, but French actor and director Jacques Weber, who headed the festival jury,accepted iton her behalf.
"This is a truly amazing film made by a very young filmmaker. It bowled me over. She is clearly someone full of talent," Weber told AFP after the ceremony.
Li, who was a well-known television presenter in China before she become a director, has never been afraid to tacklesensitive subjectsin her films. Her first feature-length effort, 2001's "Fish and Elephant", was the first mainstream Chinese film to explore the issue oflesbianrelationships.
Of the 40 films shown in Deauville from all across Asia, Li was the only woman director to present a work.
Before the festival opened the event's director, Bruno Barde, told AFP that he and his fellow organisers had categorically refused to be swayed by considerations of "political correctness" while choosing which works would be screened.
"The films that will be shown in competition at this year's festival have been chosen because they are good. Full stop," he said.
Weber told AFP Li had only narrowly clinched victory, saying another contender for the Lotus d'Or was "The Peter Pan Formula", a directorial debut by 33-year-old South Korean director Cho Chang Ho.
Cho tells the story of a high school student with a promising future as a top professional swimmer who finds himself forced to rob convenience stores to pay for his mother's hospital treatment after she falls into a coma following a suicide attempt. The film was finally awarded this year's Jury Prize.
"Peter Pan Formula is an incredible work, especially considering it is a first film, but in the end we had to make a choice and we considered Dam Street had perhaps a larger appeal," Weber told AFP.
But despite the fact that the top prize went to Dam Street, for many spectators the most moving moment during Sunday's award ceremony came when Cho accepted his Jury Prize.
(Agence France-Presse)
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