Şerban's Anti-Roma Drama Wins Locarno Golden Leopard
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- Florin Şerban's "You Don't Belong Here" — about a doctor discovering his son committed a racially motivated murder — won the Golden Leopard for best film at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, along with the Junior Jury and Europa Cinemas Label honors, making it a "consensus choice" across juries
- Young Teodor Butănescu earned a Special Mention for performance in "You Don't Belong Here," though Variety critic Jay Weissberg gave the film a mostly negative review, calling its ending "stupefyingly misguided"
- Hong Sangsoo won Best Director for his 35th feature "Nowhere to Lay My Eyes," eleven years after "Right Now, Wrong Then" took the same top prize at Locarno
- Kim Minhee shared the gender-neutral Best Performance award with Monica Bellucci — Minhee for her role in Hong's film, her second Locarno acting prize in two years, and Bellucci for her supporting turn in Giovanni Tortorici's coming-of-age tale "Ketticè"
- Isabelle Stever's "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming," a portrait of a transgender marriage amid the war in Ukraine, was "somewhat surprisingly overlooked" by the main jury but took the festival's "Environment is Quality of Life" prize and is heading to the New York Film Festival's main slate next month
- Alessandra Sanguinetti's documentary "The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer," filmed over 25 years following two cousins in Argentina's rural Pampas region from childhood to womanhood, won both the Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard and the Best First Feature Award, with Mubi handling North American distribution
Why it matters: Şerban's first major festival win since the 2010 Berlinale Grand Prix for "If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle" comes with a film tackling anti-Roma racism. The cross-jury consensus — Junior Jury, Europa Cinemas Label, and Golden Leopard — stacks three prizes behind the title heading into its fall festival run, with Mubi acquiring the parallel documentary winner Sanguinetti's "Summer."
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