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German actor Susanne Lothar, best known for her work with director Michael Haneke, has died suddenly at the age of 51. Her family lawyer, Christian Schetz, confirmed that Lothar died on Wednesday. He added he would not be providing further details "for understandable reasons".

Born in Hamburg, to actor parents, Lothar cut her teeth in theatre before winning the German federal film prize for her screen debut in the 1983 drama Strange Fruit. She went on to star in the likes of Snowland, the political saga If Not Us, Who? and Stephen Daldry's Oscar-winning Holocaust drama The Reader.

Lothar, however, was most acclaimed for her quartet of films with Haneke, starting with The Castle in 1997. She played an imperilled bourgeois in the controversial Funny Games, an anguished mother in The Piano Teacher...

MONTREAL -- Off Screen, a co-production between the Netherlands and Belgium directed by Pieter Kuijpers, picked up the top Grand Prix of Americas prize Monday at the 29th Montreal World Film Festival (MWFF), while Quebec director Claude Gagnon was a five-time winner. Gagnon won best director for his Canada-Japan co-production, Kamataki, along with the Air Canada's People Choice Award or audience award, Most Popular Canadian Film prize, the Prix de la Federation Internationale de la Presse Cinematographique (the international critics' FIPRESCI prize) and the fete's Ecumenical Prize. Other prizes handed out Monday night at the close of the festival included the Special Jury Prize that was shared by Japanese director Akira Ogata's The Milkwoman and German director Hans W. Geissenderfer's Snowland, while the best screenplay went to Jose Corbacho and Juan Cruz, the co-writers of the Spanish film Tapas.