A jury of international school children presided by Billy Elliott star Jamie Bell has awarded the Giffoni Film Festival's top prize to UK director John Hay's football hopeful movie, There's Only One Jimmy Grimble.

The youth-oriented festival, which ran July 14th to July 21st in the small southern town of Giffoni Valle Piana near the Amalfi coast, also awarded prizes to two US directors: Sean McNamara, for Race To Space, a drama about the 1960s space rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union; and John Jacobsen for his coming-of-age feature debut, Around the Fire.

Rajmund Onodj scooped the Best Actor prize for his lead role in Jurij, Italian director Stefano Gabrini's feature about a virtually blind violinist child prodigy. The Best Actress award went to Karolina Dawka, for her role in Gavin Hood's In Desert and Wilderness, about the kidnapping of the children of two engineers working on the Suez Canal dam project.

Other award recipients included Greek director Costas Kapakas's Peppermint, which scooped the National Italian Exhibitors gold prize, German director Andrea Katzenberger's The Bloody Nuisance, and Danish filmmaker Natasha Arthy's Miracle.

An impressive list of international guests, including Oliver Stone, Dino De Laurentiis, Lech Walesa, Giovanni Ribisi and Ray Liotta, attended the festival, which counted a total of around 80,000 spectators.

The festival's 31st edition also offered viewers the chance to see the European premiere of Jurassic Park III, one day after its US release.