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.

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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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Marie Amachoukeli
scheda film], which opened Cannes’ Critics’ Week, and The Rapture [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Iris Kaltenbäck
scheda film], 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Molly Manning Walker
scheda film], while another decidedly current and courageous work comes in the form of Femme [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Sam H. Freeman, Ng Choon P…
scheda film], 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Pietro Castellitto
scheda film] 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Selman Nacar
scheda film], and the Giornate degli Autori gives us Dutch director Stefanie Kolk’s debut film Milk [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Stefanie Kolk
scheda film]. Other works of European origin are Slow [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Marija Kavtaradze
scheda film] (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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ernst De Geer
scheda film] (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 [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] 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 [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Jackie Brutsche is a documentary exploring the director’s Spanish and Swiss origins; Jupiter 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 [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] - 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 [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento
scheda film], a co-production between Belgium and France, while Anna Hints’ Smoke Sauna Sisterhood [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Anna Hints
scheda film], 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 [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Nemanja Vojinović
scheda film], 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 [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Martín Benchimol
scheda film] by Argentina’s Martín Benchimol, and Queendom [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] by Agniia Galdanova, which was presented in CPH:DOX and which depicts the daily life of the courageous Russian drag queen Gena Marvyn.