A Look At The Winning Films From MSPIFF 2015

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – After showing more than 200 films over the course of the past few weeks, the 34th annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival has wrapped up, and the competition results are in.

Festival audiences were in love with canines. Festival officials say the audience choice award for best feature went to Nicolas Vanier, of France, for his Belle and Sabastian, which is about a boy and a wild mountain dog joining the resistance against the Nazis. The audience choice for best documentary went to Julia Huffman, who traveled to Minnesota to make Medicine of the Wolf, a anti-wolf hunt movie about the importance of the predator.

For the first time in the festival's history, the winners of the best Minnesota-made film awards received trophies they could raise above their heads, designed by local artist Timothy Jay Hamilton. Jurors at the festival, which is the largest film event in the region, chose to give the best local narrative feature award to Ben Bowman's Knucklehead, and they gave the best Minnesota-made documentary prize to Norah Shapiro for her Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile.

As for the non-Minnesota focused part of the competition, Saskia Diesing of the Netherlands won the emerging filmmaker award for her Nena, and Uruphong Raksasad of Thailand won the documentary feature prize for his Songs of Rice. Chad Gracia, of Wisconsin, took home the special documentary jury prize for The Russian Woodpecker.

For more information on the festival awards, click here.