Family was the focus at tonight’s San Sebastián Film Festival awards ceremony, as a jury led by Spanish director J.A. Bayona bypassed harder-edged fare to reward a number of heart-led films centered on parent-child relationships. Bayona, the Barcelona native whose credits include “The Orphanage” and “Society of the Snow,” also kept things close to home, as half the jury’s prizes went to Spanish productions.

Foremost among those was “Sundays,” the third feature by Spanish writer-director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, which took the Golden Shell for Best Film — marking the third consecutive year, following Jaione Camborda’s “The Rye Horn” and Albert Serra’s documentary “Afternoons of Solitude,” that the Spanish festival’s top prize has gone to a homegrown title. Popular with local audiences, “Sundays” follows a 17-year-old girl at a profound personal crossroads, torn between her parents’ wishes for her to attend university and her own desire to become a nun.

Belgian auteur Joachim Lafosse was a two-time winner, landing both Best Director and — together with his co-writers Chloé Duponchelle and Paul Ismaël — Best Screenplay for “Six Days in Spring,” a delicate, sweetly melancholic study of a single mother taking her twin sons on vacation in the wake of splitting from their father, borrowing her former in-laws’ holiday home without permission. It’s a gentle change of pace for Lafosse, best known for more emotionally harrowing domestic dramas, as he acknowledged in his acceptance speech. “I tried for the first time to direct a souvenir d’enfance, and it was a real pleasure for me,” he said, before paying tribute to his leading lady Eye Haïdara: “Without her, we don’t have a movie.”

Haïdara had to be content with her director’s praise, as the jury’s gender-neutral award for Best Leading Performance was shared between two other performers: Spanish TV veteran José Ramón Soroiz, as a 76-year-old gay man retreating into the closet after reuniting with his estranged daughter in Jose Mari Goenaga and Aitor Arregi’s local charmer “Maspalomas”; and Chinese big-screen newcomer Zhao Xiaohong for her affecting turn in Qin Xiaoyu’s “Her Heart Beats In Its Cage,” playing an ex-con forging a new relationship with her son after a decade behind bars for murdering her husband.

A supporting performance prize went to Argentine actor Camila Plaate for her wrenching performance in the title role of “Belén,” director-star Dolores Fonzi’s rousing legal drama about the real-life case of a woman imprisoned for murder after suffering a miscarriage — and the national reproductive-rights campaign that her story inspired across Argentina. Recently tapped as Argentina’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar, Fonzi’s film was one of the festival’s biggest crowdpleasers, and looks set to be a widespread audience favorite following its world premiere in San Sebastián.

A special jury prize was presented to Spanish filmmaker José Luis Guerin for his humanistic community portrait “Good Valley Stories,” while another Spanish title, Alberto Rodriguez’s brother-sister drama “Los Tigres,” took Best Cinematography for DP Pau Esteve.

As is often the case at San Sebastián, Bayona’s jury — which also included directors Gia Coppola and Laura Carreira, actors Mark Strong, Zhou Dongyu and Lali Esposito, and producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint — opted not to reward a number of the bigger-name titles in competition, with Claire Denis’s “The Fence,” Alice Winocour’s Angelina Jolie vehicle “Couture” and Edward Berger’s Colin Farrell-starring romp “Ballad of a Small Player” among those leaving the festival empty-handed.

In two of the festival’s other competitive sections, prizewinners from previous major festivals this year added to their hardware. Seven months after winning a Silver Bear at the Berlinale for her enigmatic adult fairytale “The Ice Tower,” French director Lucile Hadžihalilović won the top prize in the festival’s arthouse-oriented Zabaltegi-Tabakalera competition with the same film. Colombian director Simon Mesa Soto won an Un Certain Regard award at Cannes for his dark literary comedy “A Poet,” and followed that up by taking top honors in San Sebastián’s Latin Horizons program.

In the festival’s New Directors competition, however, Marco Muller’s jury handed the award to a San Sebastián world premiere: Danish director Emilie Thalund’s “Weightless,” a warm, compassionate portrait of a 15-year-old girl coming out of her shell at a summer weight-loss camp.

The festival’s Audience Award, meanwhile, went to Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” an emotionally pummelling docudrama utilizing real-life audio of a young Palestinian girl killed in one of last year’s Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. The win was hardly a surprise: Ben Hania’s film, a Grand Jury Prize winner at Venice earlier this month, has left audiences in floods of tears, and at a festival marked throughout by pro-Palestine protests at the red carpet — and where everyone from Donostia Award honoree Jennifer Lawrence to a number of tonight’s winners have felt compelled to make a vocal anti-genocide statement at the festival — the recognition felt fitting.

Full list of award winners below:

OFFICIAL SELECTION AWARDS

Golden Shell for Best Film: “Sundays,” Alauda Ruiz de Azúa

Special Jury Prize: “Good Valley Stories,” José Luis Guerin

Silver Shell for Best Director: “Six Days in Spring,” Joachim Lafosse

Silver Shell for Best Leading Performance: (ex aequo) “Her Heart Beats in Its Cage,” Zhao Xiaohong; “Maspalomas,” Jose Ramon Soroiz

Silver Shell for Best Supporting Performance: “Belén,” Camila Plaate

Jury Prize for Best Cinematography: “Los Tigres,” Pau Esteve

Jury Prize for Best Screenplay: “Six Days in Spring,” Joachim Lafosse, Chloé Duponchelle, Paul Ismaël

OTHER OFFICIAL AWARDS

New Directors Award: “Weightless,” Emilie Thalund
Special Mention: “Aro Berria,” Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe

Horizontes Latinos Award: “A Poet,” Simón Mesa Soto
Special Mention: “The Ivy,” Ana Cristina Barragán; “A Loose End,” Daniel Hendler

Zabaltegi-Tabakalera Award: “The Ice Tower,” Lucile Hadžihalilović
Special Mention: “Two Times João Liberada,” Paula Tomás Marques; “Blue Heron,” Sophy Romvari

Audience Award for Best Film: “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Kaouther Ben Hania

Audience Award for Best European Film: “Little Amélie,” Maïlys Valladeania

Irizar Basque Film Award: “Sundays,” Alauda Ruiz de Azúa

Culinary Zinema Award: “Mam,” Nan Feix

RTVE Another Look Award: “The Currents,” Milagros Mumenthaler
Special Mention: “Belén,” Dolores Fonzi

Spanish Cooperation Award: “Good Valley Stories,” José Luis Guerin

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED AWARDS

Nest the Mediapro Studio Award: “How to Listen to Fountains,” Eva Sajanová
Special Mention: “The Old Bull Knows, or Once Knew,” Milan Kumar

Movistar Plus+ Award for Best Short Film: “The Loneliness of Lizards,” Inês Nunes

Tabakalera Short Film Award: “Life is Like That and Not Otherwise,” Lenia Friedrich

Euskadi Basque Country 2030 Agenda Award: “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Kaouther Ben Hania

Zinemaldia Startup Challenge Best Spanish Project: Quickets, Felipe Ortiz

Zinemaldia Startup Challenge Best European Project: Novel Fire Masks Engineered With 3D Technology, Raoul Peltier

Zinemaldia Startup Challenge Special Mention for Entrepreneurship: Quickets, Felipe Ortiz

WIP Latam Industry Award: “Flies,” Fernando Eimbcke

Egeda Platino Industria Award For The Best WIP Latam: “We Were No Longer Five,” Esteban Hoyos Garcia, Juan Miguel Gelacio Ramirez

WIP Europa Industry Award: “February, Seven Days,” Tatjana Moutchnik

WIP Europa Award: “February, Seven Days,” Tatjana Moutchnik

XIII Europe-Latin America Co-production Forum Best Project Award: “Do Not Let Me Die Alone,” Francisco Rodriguez Teare

DALE! Award: “What Follows Is My Death,” Laura Baumeister

Artekino International Award: “La Piel del Léon,” Alvaro Brechner

Ikusmira Berriak Award: “La Koreana, Un Poema Ferromagnética de Luz y Memoria,” Joana Moya Blanco

Casa Wabi-ESCINE Award: “Do Not Let Me Die Alone,” Francisco Rodriguez Teare

QCinema Award: “What Follows Is My Death,” Laura Baumeister

Music Library & SFX Award: “Mariana X BHP,” Renan Flumian

Euroregional Documentary Award: “Altxaliliak,” Maia Iribarne Olhagarai 

Epe-Ibaia-Elkargi Award: “La Increíble Historia de Una Película Que No Hemos VistoBarrabas,” Claudia Chávez Levano, Christine Mladic Janney 

Eusko Label Micro Short Film Award: “Hatsa,” Josu Ozaita Azpiroz
Runner-up: “Gatz Harana,” Saioa Miguel