South Korean student film wins Second Prize at Cannes

"Silent Voices" by South Korea's Jin Mi-song has won Second Prize in the La Cinef section for student films at this year's Cannes Film Festival, organizers said Friday.

The 17-minute film follows a day in the life of a family who settled in New York after immigrating to the United States from South Korea. It delicately portrays how the parents and their two daughters quietly hide their emotions after their different daily struggles.

Lucas Acher's "Laser-Cat" won First Prize, while Third Prize jointly went to Julius Lagoutte Larsen's "Never Enough," and Roozbeh Gezerseh and Soraya Shamsi's "Growing Stones, Flying Papers," according to the organizers.

Jin said she did not expect the win, thanking the jury for recognizing the genuineness of her work, and the cast and crew who took part in "Silent Voices."

Actor Park Ji-min, who presided as a member of the jury, said the film is a good example of how the personal cannot be separated from the political.

Jin, who also goes by the name Nadine Misong Jin, graduated from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul and is pursuing a film production degree at Columbia University in New York.

The La Cinef section is a competition section dedicated to works produced by emerging filmmakers attending film schools. This year, 19 student films were chosen out of 2,747 films submitted globally, according to the organizers.

Last year, South Korea's Heo Ga-young won First Prize for "First Summer," which she produced as her graduation project at the Korean Academy of Film Arts.