Estonian director Kadri Kousaar's feature film debut Magnus picked up the Golden Lily for Best Film and the FIPRESCI Prize at this year's goEast - Festival of Central and Eastern European Film which closed with an awards ceremony in Wiesbaden tonight.

The international jury, headed by veteran German producer Eberhard Junkersdorf, praised the film for 'its depiction of a youngster's quest for stability in a society unable to provide him with firm ground to stand on.'

The Estonian-UK co-production Magnus had its world premiere last year in Cannes' Un Certain Regard sidebar and most recently won the top award at Prague's Febiofest a week ago. The film's producer Donal Fernandes was in Wiesbaden to receive both awards.

Serbian filmmaker Stefan Arsenijevic followed his triumph at last month's Sofia International Film Festival where he had won the Best Director Award by taking home the same prize from Wiesbaden for his feature debut Love And Other Crimes, while the Federal Foreign Office's award for a film whose 'artistic originality creates cultural diversity' went to Ukrainian Eva Nejman's debut feature At The River.

The newly created 'Remembrance and Future' Documentary Award went to Romanian filmmaker Thomas Ciulei for The Flower Bridge about a family's life in a small village in the Republic of Moldova, while Honorary Mentions were made of the ensemble of actors in Aleksei Popogrebsky's Simple Things and of Andrej Paunov's documentary The Mosquito Problem And Other Stories.

This year's edition - which saw more than 9,500 visitors attend screenings of the festival's 150 films and sidebar events - also included two innovations emphasising goEast's growing importance as an industry event. An East-West project market was hosted in cooperation with the Robert Bosch Foundation to enable young directors and producers from Germany, Eastern and South Eastern Europe to find potential partners to form a team for the Foundation's Co-Production Prize next year.

In addition, the festival was used as a launchpad for a new DVD label, goEast Edition, which has been created with distributor absolut Medien and the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, to provide wider circulation for films from Central and Eastern Europe. The first titles selected for release include two previous goEast prize-winners - Benedek Fliegauf's Dealer and Srdan Golubovic's The Trap (Klopka).

Topics