The Cheval Noir competition also gave its best director and best screenplay trophies to Carlo Mirabella-Davis for the psychodrama Swallow, which stars Haley Bennett as a woman whose disorder makes her eat tiny objects and bowed at Tribeca.

And the best actress prize went to Nina Medeiros for her star turn in the Brazilian horror thriller The Father's Shadow, by director Gabriela Amaral Almeida.

Fantasia, North America's largest genre festival that is set to run to Aug. 1, opened with the North American debut of Hideo Nakata's Sadako, the Japanese horror icon's return to his Ringu franchise, and also held a special screening of the upcoming Fox Searchlight horror film Ready of Not, starring Samara Weaving.