Belgian film Au bord du monde won the Golden Astor award for best film at the 39th Mar del Plata film festival, which officially closed on Saturday with an awards ceremony held at the city’s Auditorium Theater. 

A drama about an idealist nursing student and a 20-year-old patient in a psychiatric hospital, Guérin van de Voorst and Sophie Muselle’s film also received the Astor for best acting performance for its lead Mara Taquin. 

The Jury’s Special Prize went to Michel Hazanavicius’ animated film The Most Precious of Cargoes, a moral fable narrated by legendary French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, while Argentina’s Matías Lucchesi won best director for El casero.

The Astor for best script went to Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan for Saturday Night, a real-time depiction of the 90 minutes that preceded the live premiere of television’s earth-shifting comedy show Saturday Night Live back in 1975.  

The Latin American feature-film competition was topped by Márcia Faria’s A Procura de Martina, a Brazil-Uruguay co-production. In the Argentine competition, the best film award went to Cecilia Atán and Valeria Pivato’s La llegada del hijo, while Mariano González won best director for Adulto. The edgier Altered States Competition was topped by Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside, a Lebanon-Qatar co-production.

Astor Piazzolla Lifetime Achievement awards were also handed out at the ceremony to the 93-year-old director, producer, and writer Héctor Olivera and Hollywood-based special effects specialist Pablo Helman. Helman is an Oscar-nominated artist who has worked with directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and came to the festival to present his latest work on Wicked.

At the ceremony, festival directors Gabriel Lerman and Jorge Stamadianos confirmed that the festival will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year on the usual November dates.