Family Therapy, a family dramedy by auteur Sonja Prosenc, has emerged as the big winner at the 27th Slovenian Film Festival, taking home seven Vesna Awards, including for best feature film.

Praised by the jury for its "bold and humorous approach to the theme of dysfunctional family" and described as a "courageous and insightful satire," it also earned awards for best screenplay (Sonja Prosenc), best female lead (Katarina Stegnar), and best male lead (Marko Mandić), as well as productions design, original soundtrack and supporting actress (Mila Bezjak).

Family Therapy had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in June and its European premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival in August, where it opened the competition section.

A co-production of Slovenia, Italy, Croatia, Norway and Serbia, it is a drama about the comic dysfunctionality of relationships in a seemingly perfect family, which unravels with the arrival of a young stranger.

His arrival exposes the cracks in the family's carefully guarded facade; the mother's overprotective attitude to her daughter, the father's escape route into a dream of a family trip to outer space, and the truth hidden beneath the daughter's wig.

"I wanted the film to get people thinking about whether we can really live in airtight bubbles, whether society can really be so divided, whether all this is sustainable," Prosenc told the Slovenian Press Agency.

"The film deals with class, but also about very intimate relationships in a family, which, in turn, are always affected by the kind of society we live in," she said.

Family Therapy has already won the Arthouse Cinema Award by the CICAE jury in Sarajevo, and been selected as Slovenia's entry for an Oscar for best foreign language film.

In other major categories, Hanna Slak won best director for Not a Word (Niti besede), the story of a relationship crisis between a parent and her teenage son, while Vid Hajnšek's In My Dreams a Tree Grows Every Night (V mojih sanjah rase vsako noč drevo), a loving portrayal of the hilly Haloze region in northeastern Slovenia, was declared the best documentary and described as an outstanding creative achievement.

Slobodan Maksimović's 112-minute documentary Proto-Slav (Praslovan) about legendary singer-songwriter Zoran Predin, which received standing ovations and enthusiastic responses from viewers, received the audience award.

The festival, which began in the coastal resort Portorož on 22 October and ended with an awards ceremony on 27 October, showcased 72 films in its competition programme, including 20 feature-length films, 6 medium-length documentaries, 21 short films, and 25 student short films.