Dakota Johnson opens Zurich Film Festival

Dakota Johnson opens this year's Zurich Film Festival Keystone-SDA

United States actress and producer Dakota Johnson has opened the 21st Zurich Film Festival. She was honoured with the Golden Eye Award for her role in Splitsville and for her career.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

Johnson was presented with the award at the opening gala on Thursday evening. She presented the relationship comedy Splitsville together with director, actor and producer Michael Angelo Covino, who will also be in attendance.

Before the opening event in Zurich’s Kongresshaus, numerous celebrities walked the green carpet, including presenter and former Miss Switzerland Christa Rigozzi and musician Dabu Bucher. The evening’s guests of honour included Federal Councillor Elisabeth Baume-Schneider and Zurich Mayor Corine Mauch.

This year’s Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) features 114 films. Of these, 41 can be seen as world or European premieres. Of the 114 productions, 16 are Swiss films. One of them is the adaptation of the Max Frisch story Stiller by Stefan Haupt, which was thought to be unfilmable. Swiss film producer Anne Walser will receive the Career Achievement Award for this film and for her career.

Lifetime Achievement Award for Russell Crowe

Once again, the spotlight was on US films and their stars: Oscar winner Russell Crowe (Gladiator) who received the Lifetime Achievement Award. He can be seen at the festival in the psychological thriller Nuremberg, in which he plays the Nazi Hermann Göring.

British actress Claire Foy is known from the series The Crown. She received the Golden Eye at the ZFF for her multifaceted career and her performance in her new film H Is For Hawk.

This year’s ZFF runs until October 5. It is the first edition of the festival after the change of ownership in July this year. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung sold the ZFF to a new ownership group centred around festival director Christian Jungen.

Translated from German with DeepL/mga

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].

News