At the 33rd International Short Film Festival in the Finnish inland city of Tampere, the international jury awarded Michael Bates' Australian stop-motion film The Projectionist with the Grand Prix - out of the 75 shorts and documentaries from 36 countries in the international competition.

The Finnish jury, headed by the star of The Man Without A Past, Markku Peltola, singled out two documentaries, Selma Vilhunen's My Little Elephants as best film under 30 minutes and Alexis Kouros and Kari Tervo's Without My Daughter as best film in the long category. All films received Euros 5,000.

The Tampere festival is the oldest of its kind in the Nordic region, and it has an international reputation to match.

This year's festival saw it's already impressive audience awareness climb a further 20% to some 25,000 admissions.

Other prizes from the international jury included; the Jury's Special Prize to Alexei Shipulin's Russian documentary Kazan-Moscow-Kazan; Royston Tan's 15 from Singapore was named best fiction film, the UK's Suzie Templeton's Dog took the best animation prize; Mehdi Naderi's Iranian Dokhtaran-e-aftab won as best international documentary and finally Terje Ragnes' Norwegian Save The Children won both the Prix UIP Tampere award, which makes it a European Film Award nominee, as well as the audience award.

The latter comes with a Euros 2,000 prize, but the others Euros1,500. The most prestigious Finnish award, the Risto Jarva Prize, was handed out to Veli Grano's unusual Meet You In Finland Angel (Tähteläiset).