14/09/2026 - The latest iteration of the Swiss festival will see 14 films in each of the fiction and documentary competitions vie for a Golden Eye Award and CHF 25,000

Unspooling from 24 September-4 October, the Zurich Film Festival returns with its 22nd edition, this time with the motto “Dream Big”. The event, which is the second-largest film festival in the German-speaking world, will screen 133 films, with a new record of 21 Swiss flicks. The festival features two competitive strands, the Feature Film Competition (for first, second or third fiction features) and the Documentary Film Competition. Fourteen films in each section – including 24 European co-productions across both – will vie for the Golden Eye Award and an accompanying CHF 25,000 (approximately €26,500).

In the Feature Film Competition, five world premieres make their bow amongst the 14. The Ideas, Fabian Stumm’s follow-on to his tragicomedy Sad Jokes, is an anthology film with six segments about people breaking out of the mundanity of their quotidian lives. Rhys Marc Jones brings his debut feature, Black Church Bay, a mystery-thriller about the intimate relationship between a teacher and his openly gay, late-teen student. In Andrina Mračnikar’s Mila / Marija, a young Slovenian woman becomes the leader of a partisan resistance group in 1942 Austria. Two Turkish-language films will also make their bows: Sevda, an Istanbul-set drama by Ufuk Emiroglu; and Serife Tavsan by Tareq Daoud, a comedy about an adventurous septuagenarian.

Other competitors include Best Directing Award winners Andrius Blaževičius’s How to Divorce During the War (from Sundance) and Mads Mengel Nielsen’s The Guest (from Karlovy Vary) as well as the Cannes Critics’ Week entrants Pierre Le Gall’s Flesh and Fuel and Blerta Basholli’s Dua, both award-winning in their own right.

For the Documentary Film Competition, the festival brings Lucas Paleocrassas’s tender Greek coming-of-age tale Bugboy, the ACID entrant Detention by Guillaume Massart, and the expansive Sundance Audience Award winner One in a Million by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes. Three world premieres will feature: Vieille Peau by Simon David, who documents his visits to his great-aunt over seven years; Perfect Road by Christian and Adam Bonke, following a man who has spent ten years travelling on his bike with no belongings; and My Home of Wind and Sand by Patrick Wally, tracing the life of Western Sahara independence activist Najla.

A variety of Gala Premieres will unspool from Berlin, Cannes and Venice. These include Wild Horse Nine by Martin McDonagh (who will receive the A Tribute To… Award), Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski, Queen at Sea by Lance Hammer, the Cannes Grand Prix winner Minotaur by Andrey Zvyagintsev, A Bit of Light by Ali Asgari and Ink by Danny Boyle.

The Signatures section highlights works with distinctive styles, such as Sandra Wollner’s semi-surrealist grief drama Everytime, Werner Herzog’s eccentric twin-talking flick Bucking Fastard, Levan Koguashvili’s post-Soviet Georgian dramedy Guria and Valeska Grisebach’s Cannes Jury Prize winner The Dreamed Adventure.

US thesp Julianne Moore will be crowned with the Golden Icon Award, while other high-profile special guests will pick up the Golden Eye Award for their work, including British actress Naomi Watts, Swiss actress Luna Wedler, US actor John Turturro and French actress Leïla Bekhti. Beirut-born French composer Gabriel Yared and US filmmaker Richard Linklater will both receive the Career Achievement Award, with the latter’s work featured in a retrospective.

Rounding off the selection are the festival’s classic thematic sections. Encompassing both fiction and documentary works that speak to their respective topics, Zurich will spotlight three strands this year: Now/Future, #artificialintelligence and Sounds.