Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ Une Colonie (“A Colony”) took home the Crystal Bear award for Best Feature Film in Berlin Film Festival’s Generation competition. The film had its international premiere at the German film fest.

A Colony, which landed a nomination for Best Feature Film at the 2019 Canadian Screen Awards, is produced by Colonelle Films’ Fanny Drew and Sarah Mannering, and is Celles’ feature film debut. It follows a 12-year-old girl who leaves a small Quebec community for the first time and faces the trials of peer pressure in high school.

It was recently acquired by Game Theory Films for Canadian distribution outside Quebec and is slated for a spring 2019 theatrical release. Une Colonie previously triumphed at the Whistler Film Festival in 2018, picking up three awards, including best picture.

The Crystal Bear winner is selected by a jury of children in the Kplus stream, which focuses on youth-skewing projects.

Elsewhere, Canadian director Sandrine Brodeur-Desrosiers also earned a Crystal Bear for her short film Juste moi and toi (“Just Me and You”), produced by Camera Oscura. The short follows a young girl on a road trip with her father from Montreal to Mexico.