Prize for Film Journalism to be awarded for the first time at the Zurich Film Festival

The Film Journalist of the Year will be awarded at the 15th Zurich Film Festival ZFF and no longer at the Solothurn Film Festival, as the festival management announced on Thursday.

The ZFF has become one of the most important platforms for film distribution in Switzerland, helping to make arthouse films known to a wide audience, Pathé Film Managing Director Loic Trocmé is quoted as saying. As over 500 journalists are accredited at the festival, the decision was made to award the prize in Zurich for the first time.

The prize, sponsored by the Pathé Switzerland cinema chain and the distribution company Pathé Films, has been honoring outstanding film reviews and essays on cinema films since 2006. It is endowed with 10,000 Swiss francs. The organizers want to strengthen film criticism as an independent journalistic form.

Film journalists can apply for the upcoming award by submitting an article on a film that was shown in a Swiss cinema between June 2018 and June 2019. A three-member jury, consisting of representatives from Pathé, ZFF and the Swiss Association of Film Journalists, will select the winner from the entries submitted. Previous winners include Antoine Duplan from Le TempsMichael Sennhauser from SRF 2 Kultur, Simone Meier from Watson and Pascal Blum from Tages-Anzeiger. (SDA/swi)