Lesson Learned, a drama about the Hungarian education system, has won director Bálint Szimler the Kingfisher Prize at the 35th Ljubljana International Film Festival (LIFFe). Szimler said he found it important to highlight archaic school methods.

The film portrays a strict school system with no room for concessions, a reason for which it was made without state support but with 19 co-producers.

The team, starting with no money, felt it was time for solidarity and to show the times full of deceit and oppression not only in Hungary but elsewhere too, he said.

The LIFFe's international jury said that by focussing on one of the key institutions in society Szimler showed the painful problems of contemporary Hungary.

"He did it with freshness and humour, but also with precision and poignancy. In doing so, he rose above the current social critique and paid homage to sacrifice and freedom in his mockery of the stupidity, meanness, cowardice, narrow-mindedness and aggressiveness of human nature."

Szimler's film has received several awards before, including a special mention and the best female performance in Locarno.

In a statement for the Slovenian Press Agency, Szimler said he had built it on his own experience but also visited several schools and talked to ten-year-olds, as well as to teachers who were fired for political reasons.

He often gets questions in which period the film is set, but he said it is set in contemporary Hungary, where nothing has changed in the last few decades.

"The situation in the film is the same as it is in reality, and the attitude to children is the same as it was when I was a child, perhaps even worse, as the government has stripped most of the schools of autonomy," he said.

The festival's FIPRESCI award went to April, a socially critical film about the right to abortion by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili.

Kinotrip's youth jury opted for Toxic by Lithuanian director Saule Bliuvaite, which was praised as "a timeless documentary that questions the idealised image of the female body, which can sometimes be fatal".

The Slovenian art cinema network awarded The Other Way Round by Spanish director Jonas Trueba, and the audiences' favourite was Manas, Marianne Brennand's debut feature film about child sexual abuse in the Amazon Rainforest.