Local hero David Cronenberg and Russian Ark director Alexandr Sokurov won the major adjudicated prizes as the Toronto International Film Festival wrapped its 27th edition.

Cronenberg's Cannes competitor Spider took the Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature while Sokurov's technical masterpiece, Russian Ark, an epochal 96 minute, single-take, won the inaugural Independent Film Channel Visions Award.

The Visions jury gave special citations to Fernando Meirelles' City Of God and Gus Van Sant's Gerry.

Venice Golden Lion winner Peter Mullan added another prize to his trophy room; his feature The Magdalene Sisters won the Volkswagen Discovery Award, as polled by the festival's press corps.

Niki Caro's highly-touted New Zeland-Germany co-production The Whale Rider, (pictured) a contemporary story inspired by Maori myth, was the winner of the audience prize, the AGF People's Choice Award.

First and second runners-up respectively were Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine and Gurinder Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham.

The FIPRESCI prize was awarded to Les Chemins De L'oued, a drama about a French man hiding out in Algeria, directed by French filmmaker Gael Morel (A Toute Vitesse). The jury praised the film's political risk taking and "its power to disturb"; Morel, the only international filmmaker present to accept a prize, said he would take the prize like "a vitamin".

The jury gave special mention to Susanne Bier's Dogme outing Open Hearts, "for proving that Dogme has come of age and matured into a potent cinema language."

Canadian filmmakers in the spotlight included Best First Feature winner Wiebke von Carolsfeld for Marion Bridge while the prize for best Canadian short film went to Ann Marie Fleming for Blue Skies

Addressing an upbeat crowd, festival director Piers Handling echoed the widely-felt sense of relief that the ten-day event was uninterrupted by anything more severe than fire alarms and over-flowing press and industry screenings.

Early in the festival, screenings for a few must-see titles such as Jet Lag and Far From Heaven were filled to capacity, leaving some major US critics tapping their toes.

In all the festival screened 345 films from 50 countries - including 180 world and North American premieres.