Preity Zinta at the 2008 Toronto Internation Film Festival. (Photograph: Getty Images)

Preity Zinta, whose performance in Deepa Mehta's Heaven on Earth, received warm reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, has won the Silver Hugo Award for best actress at the 44^th edition of Chicago International Film Festival.

The jury praised her 'for her strong yet subtle performance as a woman struggling to keep her dreams despite brutal realities.'

The film, which will inaugurate the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Film Festival in New York on November 5, is the first film in which Mehta has explored the struggle of an immigrant bride in Canada and the choice she has to make to empower herself away from the abusive relationship in her new home. Married to an Indian resident in Canada, she has to use her imagination, wit and soul strength to keep her sanity and self-esteem.

At Chicago, the Gold Hugo for the Best Film at Chicago was awarded to the British-Irish film depicting an Irish Republican Army's prisoner in the UK who fasted into death. The film also featched for Silver Huge Award for Best Actor for Michael Fassbender for his self-sacrificing performance exemplifying the ideal of "being" rather than "acting."