MUMBAI: Director Yang Ik-june‘s Breathless won the grand prize and $11,560 (1million Yen) and the audience award at the tenth Tokyo Filmex that ran from 21-29 November.

The film was singled out by a competition jury headed by Japanese director Yoichi Sai. The prizes add to previous accolades including major awards at Rotterdam, the New York Asian Film Festival and Montreal‘s Fantasia.

Yang made his feature directorial debut on Breathless. He stars as a brutal loan shark who bonds with a female high school student enduring an abusive household. The film is set for a domestic release in March 2010 through Bitters End.

The special jury prize and $8,000 in Kodak colour film stock went to Bahman Ghobadi‘s No One Knows About Persian Cats.

For its tenth anniversary Tokyo Filmex had as many as 61 titles in its line-up including a retrospective on French director Jean-Pierre Melville and a concurrent Korean Film Showcase.