Hollywood film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has received a boost ahead of the Oscars after its director won the top prize at the Directors Guild of America awards.
It is the second successive triumph for Mexican-born Alejandro Inarritu, who also picked up the DGA gong in 2015 for Birdman, where he went on to win the best director Oscar and the film was named best picture.
Previous DGA winners have often gone on to claim the best director Oscar and see their movies win best picture at the Academy Awards.
And only seven times in the history of the DGAs has a director who won the guild's top award not gone on to win the Oscar.
But wilderness epic The Revenant is by no means a shoe-in for the top film on 28 February, even though it has also picked up the Golden Globe for best motion picture (drama) this year.
Rival movie Spotlight, a drama about an investigation into sex abuses in the Catholic Church, won the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.
And financial crisis film The Big Short picked up the Producers Guild Award.
Inarritu was teary-eyed as he received the DGA prize, which he called "a hug from my peers".
He said: "This hug, this embrace you are giving me today goes to a small country, to a whole Latin American community in this country.
"Your embrace makes me feel proud."
In Los Angeles, he was up against Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), Adam McKay (The Big Short), George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) and Ridley Scott (The Martian).
All of them are also up for the best director at the Oscars, apart from Scott.
Lenny Abrahamson is the other director in the Academy Awards race for his film Room.
The build-up to the Oscars has been overshadowed by a row about a lack of black stars in the top acting categories.
There have been calls to boycott the ceremony as all 20 nominations for best actor/actress and supporting actor/actress went to white performers.
In addition to film directors, the DGA also handed out television gongs.
Britain's Chris Addison won for best TV comedy direction for Veep, while David Nutter won the award for TV drama series for Game Of Thrones.
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