Coveted Swiss Quartz awards to be announced tomorrow

by Françoise Deriaz

11/03/2011 - On Saturday, March 12 in Lucerne, the winners of the 2011 Quartz Swiss Film Awards will be announced. For the moment, only the Honorary Award laureate has been revealed: producer Marcel Hoehn (T&C Film), whose career took off with Rolf Lyssy’s The Swissmakers (1978), the biggest Swiss box office hit of all time (almost 950,000 admissions).

His long-standing collaboration with Swiss director Daniel Schmid, who died in 2006, remains emblematic of his career. Together, and in cooperation with DoP Renato Berta, they created admirable works like Hecate (1982), Tosca’s Kiss (1984), The Written Face (1995) and Beresina or the Last Days of Switzerland (1999).

All the Quartz trophies will be awarded at a gala ceremony bringing together the cream of Switzerland’s film, cultural and political worlds. Swiss Confederation president Doris Leuthard will be at the ceremony to present the Quartz for Best Feature Film.

The real stars of the evening will obviously be the prize-winners. In each of the nine Swiss Film Award categories, one of the five films or artists nominated in January by the Swiss Film Academy will receive a Quartz trophy.

Which of the following will win the Quartz for Best Feature Film: Silvio Soldini’s What More Do I Want [trailer], Peter Luisi’s The Sandman [trailer], Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s The Little Room [trailer, film focus], Michael Steiner’s Sennentuntschi [trailer] or Michael Schaerer’s Stationspiraten [trailer]? The Little Room, Switzerland’s entry in the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race, obviously starts out as favourite, but the Academy’s two-round voting system can withhold some surprises.

In the documentary category, Jean-Stéphane Bron’s Cleveland Versus Wall Street [trailer, film focus] (selected in this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight) looks set to triumph, but it can’t be ruled out that the Academy members will prefer other high-quality works like Nicolas Wadimoff’s Aisheen [Still Alive in Gaza] [trailer, film focus], Sabine Gisiger and Beat Häner’s Guru - Bhagwan, His Secretary & His Bodyguard, Béatrice Bakhti’s Romans d'Ados and Mano Khalil’s Our Garden of Eden.

(Translated from French)