The week-long Shanghai International Film Festival did not end quite as smoothly as organizers would have hoped last night. The winner of its top prize was a no-show.

Nevertheless, foreign filmmakers and industry moguls who attended the festival, many of whom were visiting China for the first time, said the festival was likely to grow in size and influence.

The Best Picture prize went to the Japanese movie The Village Album. Director Mitsuhiro Mihara was not present to accept the award.

Among the 17 movies from 16 countries scrambling for the award, the winner "was a great piece of art with remarkable simplicity," said the jury.

Its leading actor, Ken Kaito, was presented with the Best Actor prize.

The low-budget production tells the story of a Tokyo-based photographer who takes snapshots of his village on the orders of his father only to discover a kinship to a disappearing way of life.

This was one of a string of awards that 41-year-old Mihara has won. In 1992, he won the Grand Prix at the Eighth Eokuoka Asia Festival for The Wind Kingdom, and Itami City Script Competition Grand Prix for Vitamin of Midsummer in 1993.

His absence at the closing ceremony was compensated for in part by the appearance of industry veterans including American actor Morgan Freeman, German New Waves director Volker Schlondorff, who is best known for his production The Tin Drum in 1979, and Hong Kong actress Karen Mok.

The seven-member jury was made up of celebrities including German director Marc Rothemund, winner of Best Director for Sophie Scholl: The Final Days at the 55th Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, and Chinese-American actress Lisa Lu, who starred in The Last Emperor and The Joy Luck Club.

Chinese director Wu Tianming was president of the jury panel. Wu's Old Well won Best Picture, Best Actor and Grand Prix awards at the second Tokyo International Film Festival in 1987.

The jury gave the Best Director prize to Dane Rumle Hammerich for his portrait of Hans Christian Andersen as a young man in The Young Andersen, and the Best Actress prize to Chinese actress Zhao Wei for her performance in A Time to Love, a Romeo-and-Juliet tale set in 1960s China.

The Best Screenwriting prize was awarded to Chinese veteran director/screenwriter Huang Jianxin, who was also given a special "Jury Panel's Prize" for his movie Gimme Kudos.

The New Zealand movie My Father's Den won for Best Cinematography, and the Vietnamese film A Time Far Past won for Best Music.

(China Daily June 20, 2005)