Glashutte Original - Sponsoring the Zurich Film Festival
WORLDTEMPUS - 27 September 2012
For eight years now, Zurich has had its own film festival, and this year for the first time German brand Glashutte Original has acted as a sponsor of the festival. "Some people found it quite unusual that we as a German brand should be sponsoring a Swiss event," said spokeswoman Christina Hentschel over the weekend. On the evening of that Sunday a handful of journalists had been invited to attend the ceremony to present the Golden Icon Award, which went to Richard Gere for his lifetime achievement. The same evening, the Swiss premiere of "Arbitrage" was aired, the latest movie starring the 63 year-old American actor in the main role.
Before viewing the movie, guests were given an introduction to the most complicated watch Glashutte Original has ever made: the Grande Cosmopolite Tourbillon. The 48 mm watch first been shown at Baselworld features a flying tourbillon, a perpetual calendar and an ingenious time-zone function that not only takes into account civil time and daylight savings time, but also the fact that not all time zones are an even 60 minutes apart - there are some that diverge by half and even quarter hours. The different time zones can simply be adjusted by the crown in both directions. They are indicated in two windows (one for "summer" time and one for "winter" time) by airport codes. If, flying westward, the hours have to be set backward from the wee hours after midnight, the calendar even allows the date to jump backward, a very rare feature indeed. The watch will be produced in a limited number of 25 pieces, all in platinum, and retail for about 350,000 Euros. It is, however, highly probable that the complications necessitating four patents will be re-used in a less complicated and less expensive watch at some later stage.
The award ceremony preceding the projection of the new movie offered some personal moments as actor Susan Sarandon, who held the laudation, seasoned her speech with anecdotes from Gere's life. The two have known each other for many years and have acted together in various films. In "Arbitrage" they actually play a couple. She also underscored Gere's humanitarian activities including his engagement for Tibet.
"Arbitrage" shows Gere in the role of a hedge fund manager who has led his firm to success, though not always with legal methods. As the financial crisis and his responsibility for the death of his secret lover threaten to make his house of cards collapse, he slides into ever more illegal methods to save himself.