LONDON (AP) ― Movies about corruption, gang violence, honor killing and war took prizes Saturday as the London Film Festival recognized cinema that confronts the harsh realities of our world.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan,” a tragic satire of small-town Russian corruption, was named best picture. The film, which took the screenplay prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, was praised for its “grandeur and themes” by a jury that included actor James McAvoy and producer Jeremy Thomas.

Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy won the first feature award for “The Tribe,” a teen-gang drama set at a school for the deaf and performed entirely in sign language, without subtitles.

Actress Sameena Jabeen Ahmed was named best British newcomer for her performance as a British-Pakistani teenager on the run from her family in “Catch Me Daddy.”

The documentary prize went to “Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait,” a searing look at war’s brutality by Paris-based director Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, a schoolteacher who filmed life in the besieged city of Homs.

Director Stephen Frears was awarded the British Film Institute’s Fellowship during Saturday’s ceremony at London’s 17th-century Banqueting House.

He was recognized for a career that has traveled from the battered streets of Margaret Thatcher‘s Britain in “My Beautiful Laundrette,” to 18th-century France in “Dangerous Liaisons,” seedy Los Angeles in “The Grifters” and Buckingham Palace in “The Queen.” Frears is currently at work on a biopic of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Playwright David Hare, who presented Frears with the honor, said “I can’t think of anyone who’s made a richer, more diverse or more consistently intelligent contribution to British film in my lifetime.”

The 58th London festival opened Oct. 8 with “The Imitation Game,” starring Benedict Cumberbatch as World War II Alan Turing. It wraps up Sunday with another tale of that conflict ― “Fury,” starring Brad Pitt as a hard-bitten tank commander in the war’s final weeks.