John Turturro will be honored with the Golden Eye Award at this year’s Zurich Film Festival.
The Emmy-winning U.S. star is being recognized for his performance in Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a project that is already garnering awards buzz. In the film, Turturro plays Harry, a seasoned pickpocket whose carefully controlled life is thrown into turmoil when a job goes wrong, setting off a tense chain of events that unfolds over the course of 36 hours.
Turturro will accept the award in person at the Swiss film festival on Sep. 26, and share insights into his colorful acting and filmmaking career during a Zurich Film Festival Masters session the following day.
“I am grateful to the Zurich Film Festival for this honor,” said the actor. “I was immediately drawn to Noah’s script and to the world he created in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. There’s a sense of tension as the clock works against Harry, balanced by a finely drawn character-driven story set in a particular time and place in New York. As a lifelong New Yorker, the world felt rich and evocative, and there was a delicacy about it that felt almost radical about the story Noah was telling,” he added.
Turturro’s career spans four decades, having worked with acclaimed directors such as Spike Lee, the Coen brothers, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, Nanni Moretti and Pedro Almodóvar.
He first gained international recognition through his collaborations with Lee, appearing in Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. With Joel and Ethan Coen, he acted in Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Big Lebowksi, in which Turturro created the iconic Jesus Quintana. For his lead performance in Barton Fink, he won best actor at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Other credits include The Truce, Quiz Show, The Color of Money, The Good Shepherd, The Room Next Door and The Batman.
On television, Turturro is best known for roles in Monk, for which he won an Emmy, as well as The Night Of, Mr & Mrs Smith and Severance.
He received the Camera D’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Mac, in 1992. Other films as a writer and director include Illuminata, Romance & Cigarettes, Passione and Fading Gigolo.
CEO of Zurich Film Fest Christian Jungen said Turturro carries The Only Living Pickpocket in New York from the first minute to the last, “while also turning it into a deeply personal love letter to his hometown.”
He continued: “Even though he portrays the antihero, we find ourselves rooting for him right until the end. That’s exactly what John Turturro is characterized by: he creates characters that are exaggerated for the screen yet feel completely true to life at the same time. With the Golden Eye Award, we honor an actor who has left his unmistakable signature on cinema for decades.”
The Golden Eye Award honors actors and actresses who shape the current cinematic year while also ranking among the most significant performers of their generation. Previous recipients of the award include Jude Law, Kristen Stewart, Dakota Johnson, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Benedict Cumberbatch.
Julianne Moore is set to receive Zurich’s Golden Icon Award this year.
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