Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia among award winners at Cannes Film Festival

Sudan, Morocco and Tunisia are among the award winners at Cannes Film Festival closes on Saturday.

Sudanese director Mohamed Kordofani's Goodbye Julia secured the freedom prize while Hounds by Morocco's Kamal Lazraq took the jury award in the Un Certain Regard competition on Friday.

In another Moroccan victory, Asmae El Moudir, who has worked on documentaries for outlets including The New Arab's sister broadcaster Al-Araby TV, scooped up the section's directing prize for The Mother of All Lies.

On Saturday, she also won the L'Oeil d'Or documentary prize jointly with Tunisia's Kaouther Ben Hania, whose film Four Daughters is about a woman named Olfa and her children.

The Mother of All Lies is about its director's family.

"Slowly, she starts to unravel the layers of deception and intentional forgetting that have shaped her life," reads a synopsis available on the Cannes Film Festival's website.

"The truth is hard to face, but in this sometimes surreal nonfiction film, El Moudir begins to draw what is real to the surface."

Cannes, a renowned annual film festival that takes place in France, reaches its peak on Saturday, with the coveted Palme d'Or up for grabs as the event closes.

Goodbye Julia was the first Sudanese film ever selected for Cannes.

On Friday, director Kordofani thanked the Sudanese people for their support as well as for not giving up.

"In the worst time of my country, I'm extremely proud to be Sudanese," he said.

His film explores the racism fuelling decades of conflict in the African nation, and Kordofani previously admitted to "contradictory feelings" about walking the glitzy red carpet while his fellow Sudanese are cowering from bombs.

Hounds features a father and son who work minor trafficking jobs before being asked to kidnap a man.

The movie was Lazraq's first feature film.

Reuters and agencies contributed to this report.