Golden Leopard Goes to Romanian Father-Son Drama

Piazza Grande in Locarno runs the same way every August: the crowd sits under the open sky, the screening starts once it gets dark, and the final night turns into a ceremony. On Saturday evening, at the close of an edition that will be remembered for its heat as much as anything else, that square watched the top prize go to a film from next door.

The Golden Leopard, the top award of the international competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, went to Romanian director Florin Serban for his film “Nu e locul tau aici,” released in English as “You Don’t Belong Here.” Organizers described it as his return to feature filmmaking. The trophy comes with 75,000 Swiss francs, roughly 92,000 dollars, and the film beat out sixteen other titles in competition.

The jury, chaired by Belgian director Fabrice du Welz and including French actress Lolita Chammah and Chilean actress Paulina García, summed up its decision in a single sentence:

For the power of its screenplay, the singularity of its vision, and its exceptional command of cinematic language.

That sentence names neither the film’s subject nor its cast. It talks about craft, about the script and how the film was made, which for a jury usually signals that the decision rested on execution rather than on the story itself. The story itself, though, is specific enough: the film follows a widowed father and his teenage son, who slips out at night on vandalism sprees without his father’s knowledge. Actor Teodor Butanescu, who plays the son, Ioan, received a special jury mention.

The same film also picked up the top prize from the youth jury, worth 6,000 Swiss francs, and the Europa Cinemas Label award, which is meant to push its winner into the Europa Cinemas theater network. When the main jury, the youth jury, and a distribution award all point to the same title, that is the rare case where a festival’s verdict and a film’s market prospects actually line up.

Bellucci and Kim Min-hee split the acting prizes

This year’s acting awards were split two ways. Italian actress Monica Bellucci won one for her role as a mother in Giovanni Tortorici’s film “Ketticè.” She plays a woman who never wanted the child she has, is psychologically unstable, and takes her frustration out on her teenage son. The film was produced by Luca Guadagnino, a name that usually guarantees a full house, though that didn’t stop part of the festival audience from reacting negatively.

The other acting prize went to South Korean actress Kim Min-hee, who leads the film “Nun Dul Dega Eomne,” released in English as “Nowhere to Rest My Eyes.” The same film brought a Best Director award for Hong Sang-soo, who already won Locarno’s Golden Leopard in 2015 for “Right Now, Wrong Then.” The story is set on Jeju Island, where a brother and sister return to their mother after ten years apart.

The rest of the winners’ list, from the main and parallel competitions:

• The Special Jury Prize and 30,000 Swiss francs went to the Brazilian film “A Margem do Rio,” directed by Mateus Farias and Enock Carvalho, the story of two men in a mangrove forest.
• In the “Cineastes du présent” section, the Golden Leopard went to “La ilusión de un verano sin fin” by Alessandra Sanguinetti, an Argentine-American coproduction filmed over more than 25 years that follows two Argentine cousins from childhood into adulthood. The same film also took the Best First Feature award, worth 15,000 Swiss francs.
• Swiss films left the main competition empty-handed. Neither “O Jacaré,” by Swiss-Portuguese director Basil da Cunha, nor “Small Talk,” by Mateo Ibarra, made the winners’ list. The host country’s only consolation came from the short film “Asheghetam” by the Filmsaazs team, a Swiss minority coproduction with France and Iran.

Is this year’s list a surprise?

Festival artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, in a statement released Saturday, called this year’s list

vibrant and contemporary, one that closely reflects the changes taking place in the film industry and in our world today.

Festival directors write lines like that as a matter of course, but the numbers behind it aren’t beside the point. This year’s program was drawn from a record 7,759 submissions, with 233 films making the selection, including 103 world premieres. The festival poster was designed by American artist Cindy Sherman, featuring an invented character in a stark black-and-white frame with a yellow leopard-print scarf.

Locarno has spent decades rewarding films that don’t yet have a distributor, and this year’s list bears that out: a Romanian filmmaker returning after a break, a Brazilian directing duo’s debut, a documentary shot over a quarter century. Familiar names, Bellucci and Kim Min-hee, took acting prizes, not the top award. That order matters. It shows what this festival still considers its real job.

The ceremony closed with a screening of the French film “Ni vue, ni connue” by Marc Fitoussi, followed by the audience award. Its lead, Isabelle Huppert, had also appeared on Piazza Grande during the festival.

The festival’s 80th edition will run from August 4 to 14, 2027.