John Turturro will be honored at the Zurich Film Festival with the Golden Eye Award for his performance in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, written and directed by Noah Segan.
The Emmy Award-winning actor, writer and director will accept the award in person in Zurich on September 26 and will share insights into his long acting and filmmaking career during a ZFF Masters session on September 27. The 22nd Zurich Film Festival will take place from September 24 to October 4, 2026.
In The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Turturro stars as 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.
Set against the streets of New York, the film combines the momentum and suspense of a crime thriller with a character-driven story about a man confronting the choices that have shaped his life. As Harry races against the clock, Turturro brings both grit and humanity to a character caught in an increasingly dangerous situation.
John Turturro first gained international recognition through his collaborations with Spike Lee, appearing in Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, and has gone on to enjoy a career spanning more than four decades, working across an extraordinary range of genres and collaborating with some of cinema’s most acclaimed filmmakers, including Joel and Ethan Coen, Martin Scorsese, Robert Redford, Robert De Niro, Nanni Moretti and Pedro Almodóvar.
Turturro has been a frequent collaborator with Joel and Ethan Coen, appearing in Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, O Brother, Where Art Thou? And the Big Lebowski, in which he created the iconic character Jesus Quintana. For his lead performance in Barton Fink, he won the Best Actor Award at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival and the David di Donatello Award. His wide-ranging filmography also includes Francesco Rosi’s The Truce, Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, and Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, as well as Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and Matt Reeves’ The Batman. He later reprised the role of Quintana in The Jesus Rolls, which he wrote, directed and starred in. He has also brought his singular comic presence to films including Adam Sandler’s Mr. Deeds and Anger Management and Michael Bay’s Transformers films, in which he played the eccentric Agent Simmons.
Turturro received the Camera D’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival for MAC, his directorial debut. His other films as writer and director include Illuminata, Romance & Cigarettes, Passione, and Fading Gigolo.
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