Founded to find the director nobody knows yet, Zurich opens its 22nd edition leaning on the faces everyone already does — and the trophy for both carries the same name.
The Zurich Film Festival was built in 2005 on a narrow, honourable premise: find the directors nobody has heard of yet. Its competitions admit only first, second or third features, and its prize — the Golden Eye — was minted to reward the newcomer, the debut, the film with no reputation to trade on. Twenty-one editions later, that machinery still runs. But it is not what the 22nd edition, opening 24 September and running to 4 October, is selling. The headlines belong to Julianne Moore, collecting a Golden Icon Award; to Richard Linklater, taking a Career Achievement honour with a retrospective attached; to Naomi Watts and John Turturro; to Martin McDonagh, handed the festival's "A Tribute To…" citation. The discovery is downstairs. The glamour is on the marquee.
The same trophy, pointed both ways
Here is the detail that gives the drift away. The Golden Eye is Zurich's competition prize for debut and newcomer films, endowed with real money and decided by a jury. It is also, in recent years, the name pinned on visiting stars — Watts and Turturro this year, Alicia Vikander before them — as an honorary tribute. One festival, one trophy, two meanings: the prize you win by making a film no one expected, and the prize you receive by being someone everyone already recognises. That collapse is not an accident of branding. It is the shape of a festival trying to hold a discovery mandate and an awards-season salon in the same building, in the same week, under the same golden name.
The Golden Eye was invented to spot the director no one could name. Zurich now pins it on the faces no one needs introducing — and calls both the same honour.
The pull is structural, not cynical. Zurich sits in the late-September slot, downstream of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, after the big three have already claimed the season's premieres and set its narratives. A festival in that position has two ways to matter: keep finding the films the majors missed, or become the elegant European stop where autumn's contenders come to be feted on their way to the ballots. This year's galas — Jennifer Peedom's *Tenzing* opening the festival, Peter Farrelly's *I Play Rocky*, Lee Chang-dong's *Possible Love* among them — lean hard toward the second. That is a rational bet; a small festival cannot out-programme Venice, but it can out-host it. The cost is quieter. Every edition that fronts the honorary Golden Eye over the competitive one teaches audiences, and eventually filmmakers, which one the festival actually cares about. Zurich still runs the discovery machine it was built to be. The question its 22nd edition leaves open is whether anyone is still meant to be watching it.