Canuck directors Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais and Stephen Dunn have won awards in the Tribeca Film Festival‘s juried world competitions.

Whitewash (pictured) director Hoss-Desmarais won the best new narrative director award. The accolade includes a $25,000 cash prize, $50,000 in post-production services from Company 3 and a work of art by Erik Parker entitled New Elands Bay.

The jurors in the best new narrative director competition were Naomi Foner, Tony Gilroy, Ari Graynor, Radha Mitchell and Stu Zicherman, who commented that, “Whitewash is funny, strange, emotionally honest, tense, pathetic, and ultimately haunting – a broad canvas for even the most experienced director to paint. It quickly became clear that we were in the hands of a filmmaker with the intelligence, imagination and bravery to carry off this very tricky piece of material. The taste and attention to detail required to deliver a story this unsettled and delicate is the work of a director – and a team – that this jury hopes will continue for many movies.”

Quebec-filmed black comedy Whitewash is about a man trying to survive the harsh Canadian winter and whose meeting with a stranger leads to an accidental death. The film stars Thomas Haden Church and Marc Labrèche.

Hoss-Desmarais and Marc Tulin wrote the script, produced by Montreal’s micro_scope.

The prizes for first-time narrative and doc directors were selected from a pool of 24 feature films.

Stephen Dunn won the student visionary award in the documentary and student short competition for Life Doesn’t Frighten Me. Dunn receives art award Platonic Haircut by Dustin Yellen.

The student visionary award was selected out of five films.

The Tribeca Film Festival runs through Apr. 28 in New York.