South Korea’s political thriller Idol (Woo Sang) nabbed the Cheval Noir trophy for best feature and scored a best actor tie for Han Seok-kyu and Sul Kyung-gu at the Fantasia International Film Festival, where prizegiving is underway.
Writer-director Lee Su-jin’s second feature after Han Gong-ju, which portrays a budding politician finding himself in the middle of a hit-and-run case involving his son’s blood-splattered car, debuted in Berlin.
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.
