“Gay re-education” comedy-drama The Miseducation of Cameron Post has won the grand jury prize at the Sundance film festival, the most influential award on the US independent circuit.

Directed by Desiree Akhavan and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, the adaptation of Emily M Danforth’s 2012 novel secured admiring reviews – including five stars from the Guardian’s Jordan Hoffman – for its compassionate study of Christian teenagers struggling with religious disapproval and the injunction to “pray away the gay”. It is Akhavan’s second feature as director, following her 2015 indie hit Appropriate Behaviour. The grand jury prize is a reliable marker of future potential, with recent winners including Whiplash, Fruitvale Station and Beasts of the Southern Wild.

The audience award for the US dramatic section went to Burden, which features Garrett Hedlund as a Ku Klux Klan member who turns against the organisation’s racist beliefs. Burden was not so well liked critically, with the Guardian’s reviewer finding it “as subtle as a sledgehammer”. The directing prize in the same section went to Sara Colangelo for The Kindergarten Teacher, the much-liked American remake of an Israeli film about a precocious pre-schooler and the teacher who encourages him.

The headline winner in the documentary part of the festival programme was Kailash, Derek Doneen’s profile of Indian Nobel prize-winning anti-slavery campaigner Kailash Satyarthi The audience award for US documentary went to The Sentence, Rudy Valdez’s examination of the effect of his sister’s 15-year jail term on her children and family. The directing prize for US documentary went to Alexandria Bombach for On Her Shoulders, a film about Yazidi activist (and former prisoner of Isis) Nadia Murad.

The Sundance film festival finished on Sunday in Park City, Utah.