Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms (Les chambres rouges) led the pack in the Cheval Noir competition at the 27th Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal.

The film won four prizes in the competition, including Best Feature and Best Screenplay. The awards were announced at a live ceremony held on Saturday (July 29).

In addition to winning Best Feature and Best Screenplay for Plante, Red Rooms took the Sandro Forte Award for Best Score for composer Dominique Plante, and star Juliette Gariépy also received the Outstanding Performance Award.

The film, written and directed by Plante and produced by Dominique Dussault of Nemesis Films, follows a young woman obsessed with a man accused of murdering three young girls. Entract Films is the film’s distributor in Canada, while H264 handles international sales.

“With incredible skill and artistry, without resorting to gore or violence, this film delivers not only an extremely disturbing and frightening experience but introduces you to characters and situations you may never forget,” said the jury in its statement, which praised the film for its ability “to implant a significant and lasting emotional memory.”

Elsewhere in the competition, the U.K. film Femme won the Best Director award for Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, and the Outstanding Performance prize for actor Nathan Stewart-Jarrett; Zelda Adams and John Adams received the Best Cinematography prize for the U.S. film Where the Devil Roams; and the French film Vincent doit mourir received a special mention from the jury for its “strikingly original take on the zombie genre.”

The AQCC-Camera Lucida prize, presented with Quebec’s Association québécoise des critiques de cinéma, went to writer-director-producer Olivier Godin’s Irlande cahier bleu, which the AQCC-Camera Lucida jury lauded for the “artisanal and independent creative spirit that emerges from it.” The jury also gave a special mention to U.K. director Graeme Arnfield’s Home Invasion.

Among the other awards, the Ukrainian film Stay Online won Best First Feature in the New Flesh category for debut features, and Japanese filmmaker Takehiko Inoue’s The First Slam Dunk won Best Feature Film in the Axis: Satoshi Kon Award for  Excellence in Animation competition.

The Fantasia International Film Festival runs through Aug. 9.

Image courtesy of Entract Films