LOS ANGELES, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- A documentary directed by Chinese student filmmaker Sun Yifan won a gold medal at the 46th Student Academy Awards here Thursday night.

Sun took the gold prize in the international documentary category for her film "Family" which follows a Chinese girl, Lola, who was adopted into a Belgian family 12 years earlier as an infant.

Her dream of reuniting with her birth family finally became true when Lola's two families met for the first time last year.

Sun was born in Hohhot in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1988 and received a Bachelor's degree in film studies at Beijing Film Academy in 2009.

Because of her admiration for film director Krzysztof Kieslowski, Sun attended the Lodz Film School in Poland.

She described her documentary as a cultural and emotional flow between Easterners and Westerners.

"The love for Lola links two families in two faraway continents, forming a happy big family," she told Xinhua.

The Student Academy Awards were established in 1972 to support and encourage excellence in filmmaking at the collegiate level. Past Student Academy Award winners have gone on to receive 62 Oscar nominations and have won or shared 12 awards.

This year, the Student Academy Awards competition received a total of 1,615 entries from 255 U.S. colleges and universities and 105 from international schools.

The filmmakers' works are judged in seven categories - four domestic school categories (animation, documentary, narrative and alternative) and three international school categories.