"Crossing The Dust" (Parinawa La Gohobar) beat nine other nominees for the best director award in the Asian feature film category at the festival, which ended Monday. It also received the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema Jury Award.

"I am dedicating these prizes to the Kurdish people. I hope that no one will be killed in Kurdistan or Iraq and there will be no more war in the world," said the 35-year-old Shawkat, who also wrote the screenplay for his debut feature film.

Among the other nominees was Indonesian director Garin Nugroho, who entered a documentary about survivors of the 2004 tsunami in Aceh province.

In an interview with AFP on Saturday, a day after receiving the awards, the easy-going Shawkat described the 74-minute movie as an anti-war film.

The plot revolves around two soldiers from Iraq's northern autonomous region of Kurdistan, Azad and Rashid, who come across a lost five-year-old Iraqi boy named Saddam crying at the side of a road, on the day his namesake, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was deposed.

Azad overcomes ethnic differences and tries to help the boy find his parents, much to the objections of Rashid, whose family was wiped out by Iraqi troops under Saddam during the anti-Kurdish campaign in the 1980s.

Azad is killed while trying to protect the boy from Saddam's troops, who want to take him back. Rashid puts aside his animosity and carries on with the task of helping the boy find his parents.

Shawkat said the film was based on true stories.

Saddam Hussein was deposed by the US-led military coalition, captured, and hanged on December 30 last year.

US forces are now bogged down in Iraq, facing a tenacious insurgency and the country is wracked by a bloody cycle of violence.

"The movie is against war and (made) to condemn the feelings of hatred people have against others. It is to celebrate the humane side and love people have for one another," Shawkat said through an interpreter.

The film is interspersed with footage of civilians looting a government office in Baghdad, US troops and tanks, and people cheering Saddam's downfall.

Filming was carried out on location in Kurdistan and Iraqi cities such as Mosul between mid-2004 and late 2006. The film was 70 percent funded by Kurdistan's ministry of culture.

"Of course there were some risks.... There were some bombings, and war was still going on in some areas (during the filming)," said Shawkat, who previously made television documentaries and short films.

"Crossing the Dust" also touched on the bloody history of the Iraqi Kurds.

Rashid has flashbacks of his family being killed in a bombing by Saddam's forces. In another scene, women weep and mourn around mass graves.

Shawkat's own family was forced to flee to Iran in 1973 when he was two. He returned in 1999 and now runs a film production company in Kurdistan.

But Shawkat says the film goes beyond just "crossing the dust" to bridge ties between Kurds and Iraqis.

"The message of the movie is much bigger.... It is about human beings. Regardless of anything that happened in the past, we can live in peace," he said.

"Crossing the Dust" has also been screened at six other film festivals including the Rotterdam film festival and the Cairo film festival.

Shawkat said he will submit it to Spain's Granada film festival in June, and is currently working on the script for his next movie, a black comedy set in a Kurdistan village.