Laetitia Masson’s romance story En Avoir (ou pas) from France has won the $3,000 Louve D’Or prize, awarded to best feature film at the Festival of Nouveau Cinema.

The $2,000 nfb prize for best doc was shared by Robert Adrian Pejo’s The Road to Eden, an Austrian film about the daily life of a Budapest mortician, and Eline Flipse’s Broken Silence, a Dutch film about Chinese composers.

Due to a lack of entries, the festival jury upset organizers by declining to award the $10,000 Telefilm Canada prize for most promising Canadian film. The Telefilm video prize went to Donigan Cumming’s A Prayer for Nettie.

Festival director Claude Chamberlan says the first-ever edition of the Nouveau Cinema Festival in New York (held June 20-24) screened a wide selection of international and Canadian films including films from Lea Pool, David Adkin, Charles Biname, Heather Frise and Velcrow Ripper, Andre Forcier, and the festival’s closing night feature, Robert Lepage’s Le Confessionnal.

Chamberlan intends to make the festival an international event and a third festival site is planned for 1997 in the village of Juan-les-pins on the Cote d’Azur.