While challenging to watch, it is a vivid portrait of childhood trauma that draws on animation, puppetry and visual effects to create a surreal inner landscape. For her first feature film, Barton has brought what she calls her “very maximal aesthetic” as an artist to the screen.

The winner of the $10,000 Australian documentary competition was Luke Cornish’s Keep Stepping, about two young women preparing for the Sydney street dance festival Destructive Steps.

One is a Romanian-born breakdancer who is aiming for the Paris Olympics; the other brings her Samoan heritage into a form of street dancing called popping.

It is a documentary that grew out of Cornish noticing a group of breakdancers practising outside a Sydney court building on a rainy night seven years ago and wanting to know more about their lives.

Other highlights of the last week of the 69th festival included the life-affirming Emma Thompson sex-in-a-hotel-room comic drama Good Luck To You, Leo Grande; Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain in The Forgiven, a blackly comic drama about appalling western tourists in Morocco; and Triangle of Sadness, the Swedish satire about the decadent lives of the mega rich that won the top prize at Cannes.

The biggest disappointment was Godland, a drama in competition about a young Danish priest travelling to a remote region of Iceland to build a church that went for stunning scenery over story logic.

While attendance was well up on last November’s delayed festival, director Nashen Moodley says hesitancy about COVID-19 meant ticket sales were down on pre-pandemic levels.

“It will take time for audiences to return to numbers they once did,” he says. “We’re still in the middle of a pandemic and that’s obviously going to have an impact on arts and other events.

“But it’s still great to be back at something close to normal in terms of having international guests, having parties, having the Hub again and having talks in person.”

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The winner of the sustainable future award was Karl Malakunas’ documentary Delikado, about three environmental crusaders attempting to save an island paradise in the Philippines.

In the Dendy short film awards, Luisa Martiri and Tanya Modini’s The Moths Will Eat Them Up, a drama about a woman confronted by a stranger on a train ride home, won both best live action short and the Rouben Mamoulian Award for best director.

Jonathan Daw and Tjunkaya Tapaya’s Donkey, which has three Anangu women talking about how donkeys came to be valued by desert communities, won both best animation and the craft award.

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Composer Caitlin Yeo won the $10,000 Sydney-UNESCO City of Film Award, while the $20,000 First Nations fellowship went to actor-director Kylie Bracknell.

Email the writer at gmaddox@smh.com.au and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.

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