Chinese filmmaker Diao Yinan has won the Vancouver International Film Festival's Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema for his film Uniform, a story of contemporary China's lost generation of young people who search for an identity amidst a society beset by industrial decay and urban despair.

According to a statement issued by the jury, Uniform was the unanimous choice for the prize because it "possesses a complexity in its characters, an economy in its storytelling and a texture in its imagery which many filmmakers don't achieve until much later in their careers, if indeed ever."

The jury also presented Special Jury Citations to Chinese filmmaker Gan Xiao'er for his film The Only Sons, "for its visually and emotionally rich evocation of life in a rural Chinese village, and to Japan's Chugoku Shoichi for his film 8 1 5, "for its radical experimentalism in tone and form, and for its fearless critique of a contemporary Japan paralysed by its imperialist legacy."

The Vancouver event runs until October 10, 2003.