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A Tribute to... Award to Director Tom Tykwer

This year’s A Tribute to... award goes to author, director and producer Tom Tykwer. This is the first time that a German filmmaker has ever received one of the Zurich Film Festival’s honorary awards. Tykwer will collect his award in person during the Award Night at the Zurich Opera House. The ZFF will screen his most important films in a retrospective held at the Filmpodium.     

Born 1965 in Wuppertal, Tom Tykwer shot his first feature DEADLY MARIA in 1993. He founded the X Filme Creative Pool in 1994 together with Stefan Arndt and the directors Wolfgang Becker and Dani Levy. It is currently one of Germany’s most successful production and distribution companies. Tykwer’s second cinema feature WINTER SLEEPERS (1997) was screened in competition at the Locarno Film Festival. RUN LOLA RUN followed in 1998, with Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu finding themselves as the protagonists in a huge international success. The film won numerous awards, including the Deutscher Filmpreis in Gold for best directing.

Next came THE PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR (2000), also with Frank Potente, followed by Tykwer’s first English language production HEAVEN (2002), which is based on a screenplay by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and stars Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribisi. Pivotal in Tykwer’s journey to international renown was the large-scale European production of PERFUME (2006), which is based on Patrick Süskind’s bestseller. The film, with Ben Whishaw, Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman in the lead roles, is Tykwer’s greatest cinema success to date.

THE INTERNATIONAL (2009), starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, was Tykwer’s second English language production and the Berlinale’s opening film. This was followed by THREE (2010), another German project with Sophie Rois, Devid Striesow and Sebastian Schipper. Tom Tykwer’s latest film, the novel adaptation CLOUD ATLAS, is another large-scale project, and at a cost of 100 M Euros the most expensive European production ever. This science-fiction epos with Tom Hanks and Halle Berry as the film’s protagonists, links six stories over a period of 700 years. The film is scheduled for releases in Swiss cinemas at the end of November.

In 2008, Tykwer founded One Fine Day Films together with Marie Steinmann, the aim of which is to support creative education projects in East Africa. As part of this project, the duo has produced such films as NAIROBI HALF LIFE (2012), which will be screened as a European premiere at this year’s Zurich Film Festival.

Tom Tykwer will give a Public Zurich Master Class on Friday, September 28 at the Filmpodium. The Zurich Film Festival celebrates the director and producer with a retrospective screening of four of his most important films: WINTER SLEEPERS (1997), RUN LOLA RUN (1998), HEAVEN (2002) and PERFUME (2006).