Indonesian film wins top award at 3 Continents Festival

The 3 Continents Film Festival jury gave its top award to a film directed by Garin Nugroho. Memories of My Body foregrounds a child who has been taught dance to female roles.

Four more prizes are awarded at the festival which this year saw nine films compete for the Golden and Silver Balloons each of them earning several thousand euros to put towards their next movie.

The Silver Balloon went to The Three Adventures of Brooke directed by Yuan Qing, a young woman director from Beijing who set her film in Malaysia.

It's the story of a young woman, bored and with wanderlust. She lands up in the Chinese community in Alor Setar in the north of Malaysia.

She finds in Alor Setar traditional culture that she says has disappeared from her country.

"A lot changed after the Olympic Games in 2008, she said. "Values have changed".

French director Eric Rohmer inspired this first feature, and that's how she managed to get onboard French actor Pascal Greggory, she added, but "my next film will be totally different."

She told RFI that if it will be inspired by an Asian film maker, it would be Wong Kar Wai. Worlds apart.

José a film about an impossible gay love story in Guatemala is the fruit of research in 12 countries and 20 cities.

It won a special mention from the international jury of film makers: Lucie Borleteau, Shlomo Elkebatz, Mahmet-Saleh Haroun and Anurag Kashyap.

Directed by Cheng Li originally from China, and co-written and researched by George Roberson it also won the Queer Lion Award at the Venice Mostra this year.

The story of a man torn between looking after his doting, hard-working yet poor mother, and his love for a young man on the go, tries to show the level of poverty, the strong influence of catholic mores and the dangers for homosexuals.

The Festival's Youth Jury voted for Winter's Night, a South Korean film by Jang Woo-jin which is strong on image and colour on a hill around a Bhuddist Temple.

In a snowy and cold environment, Jang juxtaposes old and new loves.

Two couples one at the start of their relationship reticent about kissing, and the other admitting their mutual boredom, but as they've been together so long, the question is, are they serious, and in fact, what if they are?

The Wik Audience Award went to Israeli Yona Rozenrkier's film about his country's conflict seen through three brothers' attitudes to conscription and the decrepit state of the kibbutz ideal in The Dive.

The Golden and Silver Balloon award winners will be screened at the Cinemathèque in Paris on 10 December.