Less Is More

The Zurich Film Festival was a much leaner affair this year

Photo by Viespire on Unsplash

After last week’s hiatus, I’m back with some thoughts on this year’s edition of the Zurich Film Festival (which was, in fact, the cause of the hiatus). 2024 marked the event’s 20^th anniversary, as well as my eleventh consecutive year as an attendee, and my second on double duty, as a journalist and a moderator for select post-screening Q&As (shoutout to Valeria Wagner, who knows how to make the right moderator/filmmaker pairings).

When I wasn’t chatting to directors in front of audiences, I was watching movies across the various sections. This was a somewhat cumbersome endeavor on occasion in previous years, owing to the festival’s scattershot nature (my friend Alan Mattli wrote about the event’s struggle to define a clear identity last year). Spread all over the city and divided into far too many sections, the films would sometimes struggle for air: in 2014, when I first attended, there were public screenings with ten viewers or less.