Lovely news from England: Joanna Hogg’s “Unrelated”, which my FIPRESCI jury picked as our prize-winner at the London film festival last year, has won this year’s Guardian’s First Film award, beating out Anton Corbijn’s “Control” in what sounds like a very tight race.

I’m delighted, really; no disrespect to Corbijn or his film, but “Control” is ultimately a fairly conventional accomplishment. “Unrelated”, on the other hand, is something out of the ordinary — an unaffected, almost minimalist drama about simple human conflicts, played out under the unforgiving Mediterranean sun.

Ever since I saw “Unrelated”, I’ve been quietly agitating for a Canadian distributor to take a look. It hasn’t happened, for whatever reason — I suspect the film’s smallness works against it on an international level. I guess I’ll have to settle for importing the UK DVD when it’s released in February, and pressing it on friends with multi-region players.

It’s part of the job, really it is.