A Chinese movie that cannot be seen in its native country has won the top award at New York's Tribeca film festival.
Stolen Life, a drama about a university student forced to support her studies with low-wage work, was crowned best feature film. Its director, Li Shaohong, accepted the award from the festival's founder, Robert de Niro, who launched the event in 2002 as a boost for Manhattan in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
Accepting the prize, Li said the film has still not been released in her homeland: "This is truly important for us in the sense that the film is still banned." She added that she hoped the prize would help the film get "green-lighted so my people in China can watch [it] soon".
In other categories, Felicity Huffman - star of ABC TV's hit series Desperate Housewives - won the best actress prize for her portrayal of a pre-operative transsexual woman in Transamerica.
Actor William H Macy, her husband and the film's executive producer, collected Huffman's award, saying: "She had some housewife responsibilities. Mine, not ABC's."
The best actor award went to Dutch actor Cees Geel for Simon, a film following the unlikely friendship between a swaggering drug dealer and a hyper-cautious dentistry student.
The best documentary award went to El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War, the story of a Catalan industrialist family from 1920s onwards.
The festival, which is fast becoming a key event on the independent film calendar, showed more than 250 films from 45 countries. Judges included Whoopi Goldberg, Tom Wolfe and Sheryl Crow.
