It was a time to remember bygone history and pay tribute to forgotten heroes from everyday life as the curtain fell on the Second BRICS Film Festival in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province on the night of June 27.

Brazilian director Roberto Berliner's sensitive portrayal of Dr. Nise da Silveira (1905-99), the psychiatrist who opposed electric shocks and lobotomy for the mentally ill and instead sought to treat them with occupational therapy and dedicated patience, the eponymous 2015 film Nise: The Heart of Madness won the Panda Award for the best film.

"It was a mission for me to try to tell the story of this wonderful lady," Berliner said. "Humans are so busy building cars and bombs that they forget something, which is much more important: to study and understand the human mind. I hope we can do that and become better."

Kim Druzhinin and Andrey Shalopa won the best director award for their 2016 war movie Panfilov's 28, told with humor and empathy.

Shalopa, an economist by profession, described how they struggled to raise funds for an incident in history--the valiant defense of Moscow by General Ivan Panfilov and his far outnumbered soldiers against the Nazi invaders. Though some funding came from the Russian and Kazakh governments, they raised the bulk of the money through crowdfunding with over 35,000 people chipping in.

Zhou Dongyu, who played one protagonist in a love triangle in The Soul Mate, a film directed by Derek Tsang from Hong Kong, China, in 2016, was named best actress while the best actor award went to Alok Rajwade for his portray of a depressed young man in Indian director Sumitra Bhave's regional language film Kaasav (The Turtle).

The Special Jury Award was shared by South African director Sara Blecher for her film Ayanda: Women with Brazil's Anna Muylaert's The Second Mother, a mother-daughter tale.

Blecher said she was honored to be part of the BRICS family and showcase a part of "who we are" in her film.

As the festival was declared closed and the baton was passed to South Africa, which will host the Third BRICS Film Festival in 2018, the five-day action-packed event came to an end with performances by artists from BRICS nations.

The concluding item conveyed like nothing else the spirit of the festival--openness, cooperation, win-win situation and inclusiveness. It was a moving performance by members of the China Disabled People's Performing Art Troupe, showing the BRICS community that art and culture was no longer the preserve of a few but were becoming accessible to all.

(Reporting from Chengdu)