Montreal: Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s Waiting for Happiness, a simple, impressionistic story of exile and village life on the African coast, is the winner of the Dvcolor $10,000 Louve d’Or prize for best feature film at the 31st Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media.

Waiting for Happiness opened at FCMM without Canadian distribution, but at press time, festival director and founder Claude Chamberlan said ‘several distributors’ were definitely showing interest in acquiring rights.

The 11-day festival drew a total attendance, for screenings and forums, of 100,000, up from about 70,000 last year, qualifying this year’s edition as ‘the most successful ever,’ says Chamberlan.

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s multiple Cannes Film festival 2002 winner Divine Intervention (Seville Pictures), an ironic and fresh look at the human tragedy of the Middle East conflict, received the festival’s Special Jury Award. The film was shot in Arabic and Hebrew and opened at the Ex-Centris cinema Oct. 25.

The $5,000 Radio-Canada Screenplay Award went to Mexican director Carlos Reygadas for Japon (Seville), while the $5,000 NFB Best Documentary Award went to Canadian director Peter Mettler for his three-hour transcendental opus Gambling, Gods and LSD (Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm).

The AQCC Critics Award was won by Japan’s Seiichi Motohashi for Alexei and the Spring. Canadian director Carlos Ferrand received an honorable mention for Casa Loma (Cinema Libre).

The $5,000 Volkswagen Audience Award for the FCMM’s most popular film was won by Michael Moore’s topical doc portrait of American gun culture, Bowling for Columbine (Alliance Atlantis), which had a strong Oct. 18-21 opening weekend on screens across North America.

FCMM awarded three additional $5,000 prizes:

* The Vision Globale Best Short Award – Dream Work by Peter Tscherkassky (Austria, 2001)

* The IPL Best Digital Creation Award – Chroma by Erik Loyer (U.S., 2001)

* The Bell Fund Cyberpitch Award, which also includes an invitation to the Banff New Media Institute’s 10-day Interactive Screen workshop, is shared by Canadian interactive 3D Web artists Julie Lapalme for Tongue Rug/Tapis a Langues and Chia-Yi Tung for Les Jouets de l’Empereur de Chine: du traditionnel au virtuel.

-www.fcmm.com