European films took home all of the prizes at this year’s edition of the Zurich Film Festival which will come to an end on Sunday evening (Oct 3) with a gala screening of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

The awards ceremony on Saturday evening saw the International Feature Film Competition jury headed by US actor Frank Langella presenting its Golden Eye to Serbian filmmaker Srdjan Koljevic’s The Woman With A Broken Nose. The German-Serbian co-production, which had its world premiere at the Cinema City festival in Novi Sad in June, will have its UK premiere at the Raindance Film Festival in London on Monday and Tuesday. Aktis Film International is handling world sales.
 
The Golden Eye for the best film in the German-Language Feature Film Competition went to Florian Cossen’s feature debut The Day I Was Not Born (Das Lied in Mir) which had won three prizes (FIPRESCI Prize, ex aequo Ecumenical Prize and the People’s Choice Award) at the World Film Festival in Montreal.
 
Meanwhile, the jury of the International Documentary Film Competition chose Danish filmmaker Janus Metz’s Armadillo about Danish soldiers stationed in Afghanistan for six months for its Golden Eye.
 
All three awards include a CHF 20,000 cash prize and another CHF 60,000 towards the promotion of each film’s theatrical release in Switzerland.
 
In addition, the Swiss Association of Film Journalists (SVFJ) gave their Critics Choice Award to Pal Adrienn by Hungary’s Agnes Kocsis, while the New Talent Award was picked up by Belgian Hans van Nuffel’s Oxygen (Adem), the winner of the Grand Prix des Americas and the Ecumenical Award in Montreal at the beginning of September.
 
Finally, festival-goers attending screenings of the three competitions were able to vote for their favourite film for the Audience Award. The people’s choice this year was Mike Schaerer’s feature debut Stationspiraten which was produced by Lucerne-based Zodiac Pictures and will be released in Switzerland by The Walt Disney Studios (Schweiz) in November .
 
The awards ceremony in Zurich’s Schauspielhaus am Pfauen theatre was also attended by such VIP guests as Oliver Stone, producer Ed Pressman, filmmaker Adrian Grenier, pop legend Bob Geldof (who presented the Audience Award), and veteran DoP Vilmos Zsigmond.
 
Moreover, Festival organizers Nadja Schildknecht and Karl Spoerri landed something of a coup by winning US rock singer and actress Courtney Love to come to Zurich to give the laudatory speech at the awards ceremony in honour of filmmaker Milos Forman who is the subject of this year’s “A Tribute To…” sidebar and the recipient of the Tribute lifetime achievement award.
 
Love had appeared in two of Forman’s films The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon.
 
On Sunday evening, Danny de Vito was due to be in town to accept the Golden Icon Award ahead of a screening of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps on behalf of his friend and colleague Michael Douglas whose cancer treatment had prevented him from attending in person.

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