Japanese director Tetsuo Shinohara's The High-School Girl's Friend (Jogakusei no tomo) received the $6,715 (CHF 10,000) 'Grand Prix Cinema Tout Ecran' for Best Film at this year's Cinema Tout Ecran Festival in Geneva (October 21-27) which also featured a retrospective dedicated to Atom Egoyan.

The International Competition jury, including Pierre-Henri Deleau, German producer-distributor Karl 'Baumi' Baumgartner and Canada actress-film director Carole Laure, additionally awarded newcomer German director Henner Winckler's Class Trip (Klassenfahrt) the $6,715 'Grand Prix Cinema Tout Ecran' for 'his perfect mastery in directing and the delicacy of his approach to adolescence in its quest for identity.'

This year's $6,715 Titra-Film Prize to support a film's better theatrical distribution went to Ursula Meier's Swiss-French-Belgian co-production Des Epaules Solides which also won the Richemond Prize for best female acting performance by Louise Szpindel and the TV5 Prize for the Best French-speaking film.

Other prizes awarded at the festival, which showcases feature films produced by or for television, included the Richemond Prize for best male acting performance to Alexander Senderovich in Lina and Slava Chaplin's A Trumpet In The Wadi; the International Airport of Geneva Prize for Best Series to John McNaughton's Push, Nevada; the Swissperform Prize for the Best Swiss Television Film to Bianca Conti Rossini's Strada Principale; and the Tribune de Geneve's Readers Prize to A Ticket To Jerusalem by Rashid Mashrawi.