CANNES—Canada’s Xavier Dolan has won the Grand Prix, the second-place prize at the Cannes Film Festival, for his dysfunctional family dramaIt’s Only the End of the World.

It ties with Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, which won the Grand Prix in 1997, for the highest honour ever won for a Canadian feature film at Cannes‎.

The top prize, the Palme d’Or, at the close of the 69th Cannes fest went to ‎Britain’s Ken Loach for his social realism drama, I, Daniel Blake. It’s the second Palme win for Loach, 79, a Cannes veteran, who won the Palme in 2006 for the Irish conflict drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

He dedicated the award to the poor and homeless Britons the film compassionately depicts, and called for social change the world over.

“We must give a message of hope,” Loach said, his voice filled with emotion.

“We must say another world is possible — and necessary.”

And it’s the second big Cannes win for Dolan, 27, as the Montreal filmmaker looks to be making slow but steady ‎progress towards eventually winning the Palme.

He won the third place Jury Prize in 2014 for his maternal drama Mommy, a prize he shared with a film by French auteur Jean-Luc Godard.

This time, the award was all his own. And Dolan wept on the stage as he accepted his trophy from a fellow Canadian, actor Donald Sutherland, a member of Mad Max director George Miller’s nine-person Palme jury.

“Thank you for feeling the emotion of the film,” Dolan told the jury.

He was doubly glad the jury appreciated his film, based on a French stage play about a gay man returning home with news of terminal illness, because it had been largely slammed by critics here for its high-intensity acting‎ and relentless use of close-ups. The film stars an A-list‎ cast of French actors, including Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux.

Dolan said the past few days of first having his film ravaged by critics and then seeing it saluted by the Palme jury taught him something about his work and himself.

“You have to remain true to yourself, no matter what people think,” he said. “It is an unoriginal thing to say, but it is what it is. So that’s how I feel, right here, right now.”

Dolan’s film also took the top prize of the Ecumenical Jury, an independent panel at Cannes, which recognizes works of human spiritual merit. It praised Dolan’s film for “filming in a transcendental way.”

To call Dolan’s win a surprise would be an understatement.

Most pundits predicted Dolan‎ would go home empty-handed, with the Palme going to Germany’s Maren Ade for her father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann. But Ade and her film were shut out of the winner’s circle.

“We avoided looking at what other people were saying,” Miller said at the press conference following the awards.

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He also said the jury felt no pressure to give the Palme to a female director, something that has happened just once in Cannes history: Jane Campion’s The Piano in 1993.

“We judged each film on its merits . . . it really didn’t come up,” he said‎.

‎This year’s Jury Prize went to Britain’s Andrea Arnold for her U.S. road drama American Honey, another film pipped for the Palme.

Best Director was shared by Romania’s Christian Mungiu for morality drama Graduation and France’s Olivier Assayas for supernatural thriller Personal Shopper.

Best Actor went to Iran’s Shahab Hosseini for The Salesman, another morality story, which also won writer/director Asghar Farhadi the Best Screenplay prize.

Best Actress went to Jaclyn Jose, who plays an impoverished mother forced to sell drugs in Ma’Rosa, by Filipino director ‎Brillante Mendoza. This also caught the critics by surprise.

“I think the critics were wrong,” Sutherland said. “But there were a lot of great performances by women.”

‎There was some physical humour from Sutherland at the press conference, who sported a head scarf apparently given to him by a journalist. He’d complained at the opening day press conference that he was freezing because the air conditioning was turned up too high.

“Movies resonate in your heart and soul,” Sutherland said, saying they’d make such an impression regardless of whether they’re viewed by a Cannes jury or by regular moviegoers throughout the world.

With files from AP

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