South Korean box office smash film “A Taxi Driver” took home three prizes, including best picture, at this year‘s Asian World Film Festival, which recently closed in Los Angeles, the film’s local distributor said Monday.

The film also received the “He Can Do, She Can Do, Why Not Me” Humanitarian Award and the Special Mention Award for its lead actor Song Kang-ho with a comment that he showed a “dynamic, intricate and compelling performance.”

The festival began in 2015 to draw greater recognition to the region‘s wealth of filmmakers ahead of the United States’ film awards season. The third edition of the festival was held from Oct. 25 to Nov. 2.

The Korean period drama will represent South Korea in the foreign film category of the 90th Academy Awards, to be held in March.

Directed by Jang Hoon, the movie was inspired by the real-life story of a Seoul taxi driver who takes the late German correspondent Jurgen Hinzpeter to the southwestern provincial city of Gwangju for a large amount of money and witnesses the horrors of the bloody military crackdown on the pro-democracy people‘s uprising of May 1980. Hinzpeter, helped by the taxi driver, becomes the first western reporter to send out footage of the bloodshed.

The film sat on the local box office throne for a long time, selling more than 12 million tickets after it opened in August. (Yonhap)