21/09/2023 - In addition to international guests, the festival has announced a record number of world and European premieres, a staggering 52 out of 148 films

Swiss films – eighteen in total, across the various sections - once again dominate the line-up of the Zurich Film Festival (28 September – 8 October). Among the many world premieres on the agenda this year, we’ll see Michael Steiner’s thriller Early Birds, Thomas Thümena’s latest documentary about an official within the Salvation Army, Heaven above Zurich, and the highly anticipated series Davos by Jan-Eric Mack, Anca Miruna Lazarescu and Christian Theede, which is a significant co-production between Switzerland and Germany.

For its nineteenth edition, the festival is wagering on a considerable number of US guests (including actor Ethan Hawke), who will be presenting their films and receiving the various prizes awarded at the event each year. This time round, it will be American director Todd Haynes who receives the A Tribute to… Award, and he’ll also be presenting his latest movie, May December, which competed in Cannes back in May. Actress Jessica Chastain, meanwhile, will be honoured with the Golden Icon Award.

As for the fourteen films competing for the Golden Eye Award in the fiction competition, ten of these are European productions and co-productions. France is especially well represented thanks to Marie Amachoukeli’s Àma Gloria [+see also:
film review
interview: Marie Amachoukeli
film profile], which opened Cannes’ Critics’ Week, and The Rapture [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iris Kaltenbäck
film profile], which is Iris Kaltenbäck’s first feature film and which also screened in Critics’ Week where it scooped the SACD Prize. Likewise presented in Cannes, where it bagged the Un Certain Regard trophy, is British director Molly Manning Walker’s first film How to Have Sex [+see also:
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interview: Molly Manning Walker
film profile], while another decidedly current and courageous work comes in the form of Femme [+see also:
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interview: Sam H Freeman, Ng Choon Ping
film profile], the first film by the equally British directorial duo composed of Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, which was presented in the Berlinale’s Panorama section and which follows the inner world of a London-based drag queen (played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, who won an award in Montreal’s Fantasia Festival for his exceptional performance, where the film also bagged the Best Director trophy). Hailing from Venice’s Biennale, we find Enea [+see also:
film review
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interview: Pietro Castellitto
film profile] by Pietro Castellito, who’s the son of actor Sergio Castellito, while the Orizzonti section offers up Turkish director Selman Nacar’s second work Hesitation Wound [+see also:
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interview: Selman Nacar
film profile], and the Giornate degli Autori gives us Dutch director Stefanie Kolk’s debut film Milk [+see also:
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interview: Stefanie Kolk
film profile]. Other works of European origin are Slow [+see also:
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interview: Marija Kavtaradze
film profile] (previously selected in Sundance and Karlovy Vary) by Lithuanian screenwriter and director Marija Kavtaradze, which takes a head-on approach to tackling the subject of asexuality; The Hypnosis [+see also:
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interview: Asta Kamma August
interview: Ernst De Geer
film profile] (presented in Karlovy Vary), which is a comedy-filled first film by Swedish director Ernst de Geer; and, last but not least, the feel good movie Varvara by Moldovan actor and director Anatol Durbală, which is set for an international premiere.

The Focus competition, for its part, includes six world premieres, four of which are Swiss works (out of a total fourteen films in competition): The Driven Ones [+see also:
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film profile] is Piet Baumgartner’s debut feature-length documentary telling the tale of five budding CEOs; Retour en Alexandrie is a road movie by Tamer Ruggli, starring Nadine Labaki and Fanny Ardant; Lonely is Michele Pennetta’s 3rd feature film; Las toreras [+see also:
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film profile] by Jackie Brutsche is a documentary exploring the director’s Spanish and Swiss origins; Jupiter [+see also:
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interview: Benjamin Pfohl
film profile] is a pseudo-sci-fi first feature film by Germany’s Benjamin Pfohl; and there’s also Benjamin Rost’s documentary Harraga – Those Who Burn Their Lives.

The documentary competition is hosting a similarly copious cohort of European (co)-productions, including two films presented in CPH:DOX: A Year in a Field [+see also:
film review
film profile] - an experimentally-flavoured first film by England’s Christopher Morris - and A Storm Foretold by Denmark’s Christoffer Guldbransen, homing in on Donald Trump’s advisor Roger Stone. Denmark also owes its presence in the competition to A Silent Story by Anders Skovbjerg Jepsen, while France is represented, in this section, by Nicolas Peduzzi’s On the Edge [+see also:
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film profile], which was presented in Cannes’ ACID line-up, and Armel Hostiou’s entertaining work The Other Profile. Meanwhile, the Colombian director trained in France Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento has been selected via Adieu sauvage [+see also:
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interview: Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento
film profile], a co-production between Belgium and France, while Anna Hints’ Smoke Sauna Sisterhood [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Anna Hints
film profile], which won an award in Sundance, also features among the European works chosen for this section. Other movies worth a mention include In the Rearview [+see also:
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film profile], a first film by Maciek Hamela which was presented in Cannes’ ACID line-up and which follows a bus of Ukrainian civilians fleeing to Poland, and Bottlemen [+see also:
film review
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interview: Nemanja Vojinović
film profile], by Serbian director Nemanja Vojinović, which won the Heart of Sarajevo Prize for Best Documentary. The final European films in this selection are the co-productions The Castle [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Martín Benchimol
film profile] by Argentina’s Martín Benchimol, and Queendom [+see also:
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film profile] by Agniia Galdanova, which was presented in CPH:DOX and which depicts the daily life of the courageous Russian drag queen Gena Marvyn.

(Translated from Italian)