A Swedish fantasy romance thriller has won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard strand at the Cannes Film Festival.

Gräns, about a customs officer with an inhuman sense of smell, who develops an inexplicable attraction to a suspect, was chosen by a jury led by the American actor Benicio del Toro.

Sergei Loznitsa was named the best director in the competition for his study of the restive east of his country in Donbass – the name of the region.

The jury’s Special Prize went to the Brazilian documentary, The Dead and the Others. João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora followed an Indigenous Krahô as he tries to adapt to contemporary Brazil.

The prize for the best performance went to Victor Polster, who plays a transgender teenager who dreams of becoming a ballerina in the Belgian drama Girl, directed by Lukas Dhont.

Del Toro’s jury gave its best screenplay award to the Moroccan film-maker Meryem Benm’Barek for her drama Sofia, about a teenager whose family have to think quickly about how to deal with her unexpectedly becoming a mother, in a country where sex outside marriage is illegal.

The jury said, in a statement, that out of the 2000 films considered by the Festival, the 18 they saw in the Un Certain Regard sidebar “were all in their own way winners.”