Cannes has the Palme d'Or. Berlin the Golden Bear. Venice the Golden Lion.
Festivals all around the world have prizes for best film so it makes sense for Sydney Film Festival to have something different. Its $60,000 prize rewards "courageous, audacious and cutting edge" filmmaking.
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Like any competition decided by a jury, its winners have been a mixed bag over 10 years. When the Iranian masterpiece A Separation won in 2011, it was easily the best film in the competition. When Only God Forgives won in 2013, it was pretty much the worst.
But despite critics of the criteria, there is no denying the 12-film competition attracts wildly creative work – films you only ever see at a festival.
Take the drama Wolf and Sheep this year. Written and directed by a young Afghan woman, Shahrbanoo Sadat, it focuses on the daily rituals of remote village life in mountainous Afghanistan.
Boys throw rocks with slings and abuse each other with the foulest of mouths. Girls smoke, act out pretend weddings and gossip. Their families tend sheep and make bread. Threaded through their conversations are references to a mythical Kashmir wolf who attacks from the mountains at night.
It's a slow film that resembles an ethnographic documentary until you realise the wolf story is a cautionary fairy tale. When the villagers hear gunmen are headed their way, they grab whatever they can and flee. Just as they have done from past generations of gunmen.
Sadat transported 38 members of her family to neighbouring Tajikistan to shoot the film – having the budget for just a single take of every shot. So credit to her for audacity and persistence. One strange, surreal image will linger for a long time – a naked woman representing the mythical wolf's alter ego, a green fairy, walking slowly through the mountains at night.
The sexy Mexican drama The Untamed stood out early in the competition in a field that includes Warwick Thornton's lively documentary We Don't Need A Map, about the significance of the Southern Cross; Michael Haneke's not-so-happy-family-drama Happy End; Aki Kaurismaki's drolly charming The Other Side of Hope, about a Syrian refugee seeking asylum in Finland; the Georgian drama My Happy Family, about a woman leaving her husband and children to seize her life back; and Benedict Andrews' Una, about a woman confronting her sexual abuser.
But eight films in, one competition film has proven exceptional again this year. Raoul Peck's documentary I Am Not Your Negro starts with a premise that is not especially cinematic – examining race in America using writer James Baldwin's notes for a planned book on the assassination of three friends, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
But it's a ferocious, sometimes shocking film that shows what a remarkable intellect and livewire screen presence Baldwin was.
His words, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, are mesmerising amid example after example of how America has failed its black population. "The story of the negro in America is the story of America," Baldwin/Jackson says coolly. "It is not a pretty story."
Baldwin might have made his name as a writer in the 1950s and '60s but his ideas resonate right up to Obama's presidency, the Ferguson riots and Black Lives Matter protests – and across the Pacific to race as an issue in this country.
Producer Hébert Peck, Raoul's brother, received a well-deserved standing ovation after the first festival screening of a film that was nominated for best feature documentary at the Oscars this year. Incendiary and thought-provoking, it's one of those brilliant films you want to watch again as soon as it finishes.
Twitter @gmaddox