John Hillcoat'sThe Proposition took the Mary-Jean Mitchell Green award for bestnarrative feature at the ninth Bermuda International Film Festival.

"We were impressed with the provocative portrait of The Proposition, of whether the humanrace can overcome its base need for violence," said jury chair and actor Peter Riegert. "All the elements - cinematography, writing,acting and direction - made this a compelling and horrific look at thatquestion."

Pippa Scott's King Leopold's Ghost was named best documentaryfeature.

"We were impressed by the arc of the story, by how muchresearch was behind the material - and how powerful the film is," said jurorRoger Durling, director of the Santa BarbaraInternational Film Festival.

Lluis Quilez's Avatar won the M3 WirelessBermuda Shorts award. BIFF is a qualifying festival for the short film AcademyAward.

The cash prizes were $5,000 to Hillcoat and $3,000 to Quilez.

The audience award went to theclosing night film, Julian Jarrold's Kinky Boots.Audience runners-up were Rare Bird by local filmmaker Lucinda Sperling and The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandelaby Thomas Allen Harris.

The narrative features jury gavea number of special awards: cinematography mentions to Alain Duplantier for The Ring Finger and Martin Stepanek for Shark in the Head and best performancesmentions to Ray Winstone and Emily Watson for The Proposition, OldrichKaiser for Shark in the Head, andOlga Kurylenko for The Ring Finger.

Rare Bird also earned aspecial mention from the documentary jury.

The festival ran March 17-25 screening 74 films from 34countries.