NEW DELHI: Salma, an India-based documentary by British filmmaker Kim Longinotto, has received the second place in Panorama Audience awards at Berlinale.

Salma chronicles the life of a woman from south India who was locked by her parents on reaching puberty and decided to fight her way back to the outside world twenty-five years later. She is now a well-known poet.

The Panorama Audience Award has been given since 1999. During the Berlinale, movie-goers were asked to rate the films shown in the Panorama section and over 28,000 votes were cast and counted altogether. This year the Panorama presented 52 productions from 33 countries, of which 20 were documentaries.

The 63rd Berlin International Film Festival will come to a close on February 16 with the presentation of the awards.

The first prize for documentaries went to The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer which is a Denmark/Norway/Great Britain collaboration. The third prize went to A World Not Ours by Mahdi Fleifel (Lebanon/Great Britain/Denmark).

In fiction, the prizes went to: The Broken Circle Breakdown by Felix van Groeningen (Belgium/Netherlands); Reaching for the Moon by Bruno Barreto (Brazil) and Inch‘Allah by Ana?s Barbeau-Lavalette (Canada/France).