Montreal-based filmmaker Lixin Fan's Last Train Home scored the top prize at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) over the weekend.

Last Train Home, the feature film debut of former China Central Television journalist and Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Fan, has garnered critical and industry attention.

The movie — which explores the gruelling lives of migrant Chinese workers by focusing on one family in particular — nabbed the award for best feature documentary at the festival's closing ceremony on Friday night.

"It's a work about modern-day China. It's a work about 130 million migrant workers who move from their villages in China to factories in Guangzhou. It's a work that is about things as mundane as taking a train home for your vacation.… And it's a film about relationships," the jury said.

"It's extraordinarily, absolutely beautifully crafted, original in a way that films rarely are, and a film for which its director, Lixin Fan, deserves to be congratulated."

The Player, in which Dutch filmmaker John Appel explores his father's gambling addiction, won an inaugural award for best Dutch documentary.

Judith Ehlrich and Rick Goldsmith's The Most Dangerous Man in America — about Daniel Ellsburg, the young, Vietnam War defence analyst who leaked information to the New York Times in the 1970s — was honoured with a special jury award.

Louie Psihoyo's dolphin-hunt film The Cove added another audience award to its already hefty list of film-world accolades.

The festival's first appearance prize went to Ross McDonnell and Carter Gunn's Colony, about the mysterious colony collapse disorder affecting bees in the U.S.

Other winners included:

  • Best mid-length documentary: Iron Crows, Bong-Nam Park.
  • Best short documentary: Six Weeks, Marcin Janos Krawczk.
  • Best student documentary: Redemption, Sabrina Wulff.
  • Doc U! Prize (chosen by youth jury): The Yes Men Fix the World, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnanno.