A Cambodian film, featuring clay figures to portray events in the country’s past for which the pictures are missing, has been chosen as the best film in the more artistic side-bar of the Cannes Film Festival. The jury, headed by the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, chose Rithy Panh’s autobiographical The Missing Picture as the best film in the Un Certain Regard strand.

The contest featured seventeen films from fifteen countries but the strand opened with Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, which was playing out of competition

Vinterberg said the selection had been “outstanding in many ways.” “One of the finest achievements in filmmaking is to create unforgettable moments – moments that stay with us – as a collective memory – as a collective mirror of our existence,” he wrote in a letter to the festival’s organisers. “Clay figures, extreme beauty, violence, homosexual blow jobs, systematic humiliation of the human kind, Léa Seydoux’s legs, great Brando imitations are just some of the unique images that will follow us for a while.”

The Brando imitation came in the runner-up in the contest; the Jury Prize went to Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad for Omar, a thriller about both political tensions between the Palestinians and the Israelis and personal tensions within the Palestinians themselves.

Alain Guiraudie won the Directing Prize for Stranger By The Lake.

The Certain Talent Prize went to the ensemble cast of Mexico’s La Jaula de Oro, or The Golden Gage.

The young Californian director Ryan Coogler was honoured as a film-maker to watch for the future, for his feature debut, Fruitvale Station.