CANNES, France - Chinese director Bi Gan won on Saturday the Special Award at the 78th Cannes Film Festival for his epic fiction feature Resurrection, known in Chinese as Kuang Ye Shi Dai.

Introducing the first award of the evening, Jury President Juliette Binoche described Resurrection as "an exceptional movie".

In his acceptance speech, Bi thanked the Festival and his cast. He also expressed his gratitude for all those who have constantly contributed to the development of cinema.

Resurrection, directed by the 35-year-old Bi, premiered late Thursday night. He used this two-hour and forty-minute film to show his love for cinema, starting the movie with a silent movie style.

Festival organizers introduced Resurrection as a work that showcases the continued evolution of Bi's creativity, while staying true to the sensory and poetic qualities that define his unique cinematic style.

For French film critic Gerard Marion, Resurrection was like a universe. "It's something that I rarely saw in cinema, especially by a Chinese director," he told Xinhua.

Bi took the audience to a "very particular universe where we should just let the sound, image, motion and decor take us there", Marion said.

In his review, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, called Bi's Resurrection "bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike".

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Bi first attended Cannes in 2015 with his debut feature film. The festival said that he has since established himself as a major player in shaping and defining the new generation of Chinese arthouse cinema.

In the press conference after the closing ceremony, Binoche said that all members of the Jury agreed to award Bi with the Special Award, because Resurrection "is like a UFO, an amazing invention".

For her, Resurrection was so different. "Visually, it really moved me. I found it extraordinary. This film allows for dreams, subtexts that we feel and that are real. It's full of poetry and allows us to feel something within ourselves," she said.

For his part, Bi explained why he created Resurrection. "There should be a film about the cinema that can comfort people in this world full of changes," he said.

During the closing ceremony, all the awards of the Competition section were announced. Iranian director Jafar Panahi's film A Simple Accident was crowned the Palme d'Or.

The Grand Prix was given to the film Sentimental Value directed by Joachim Trier. The Jury Prize was shared by two movies, Sirat directed by Oliver Laxe, and Sound of Falling directed by Mascha Schilinski.

Brazilian movie The Secret Agent (Portuguese: O Agente Secreto) was the big winner of the night, taking home Best Director (Kleber Mendonca Filho) and Best Performance by an Actor (Wagner Moura).

The Jury gave Best Performance by an Actress to Nadia Melliti for her role in The Little Sister (French: La Petite Derniere). Belgium's famous Dardenne brothers won Best Screenplay for Young Mothers (French: Jeunes Meres). 

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This year, a total of 22 feature films were selected to compete for the Festival's highest honor, the Palme d'Or. The 78th Cannes Film Festival ran from May 13 to 24.