You Don’t Belong Here, the Romanian drama directed by Florin Șerban, won the Golden Leopard at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland on Saturday, 15 August 2026. The award was announced during the festival’s closing-day ceremony, bringing its main competition to an emphatic conclusion.
Șerban’s 154-minute film, originally titled Nu e locul tău aici, centres on Marius, a widowed chief medical officer raising his teenage son, Ioan. When the boy becomes involved with masked vigilantes and is suspected in a killing, their relationship is tested by fear, loyalty and the violence gathering around them.
A Golden Leopard for a fractured family story
The jury’s decision gave the festival’s highest honour to a film that turns a tense father-and-son relationship into a wider examination of intolerance and social division. Teodor Butănescu, who plays Ioan, also received an honourable mention for his performance.
The result was not widely predicted before the ceremony. Independent reports described other competition titles as stronger favourites, making the victory for You Don’t Belong Here one of the closing day’s most notable developments. The Golden Leopard carries a prize of CHF 30,000, shared between the director and producer.
Șerban has previously built a career around morally charged stories and close observation of characters under pressure. His debut, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize and the Alfred Bauer Prize at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival. Later films, including Box and Love 1. Dog, received recognition at Karlovy Vary and Sarajevo, according to his Fantascope Films biography.
A broad closing-day palmarès
Locarno’s jury also awarded the Special Jury Prize to A Margem do Rio, Brazilian filmmaker Felipe M. Bragança’s story set around Recife’s mangroves. South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo received the best director award for Nun Dul Dega Eomne, while Kim Min-hee and Monica Bellucci were among the acting prize recipients.
The awards completed a ten-day edition that ran from 5 to 15 August and presented films across several competitions and the open-air Piazza Grande programme. The City of Locarno describes the festival as a meeting place for emerging voices and established filmmakers, with the Golden Leopard remaining its central distinction.
Why the win matters
The award places Șerban’s new film in the international spotlight at the start of its festival journey. It also reinforces Locarno’s longstanding role as a platform where formally ambitious and politically alert cinema can move from specialist attention to wider recognition.
For the Romanian filmmaker, the result is both a major career milestone and a continuation of an artistic path shaped by difficult family bonds, institutional pressure and lives pushed towards irreversible choices.
Image: Piazza Grande during the 78th Locarno Film Festival on 5 August 2025. Contextual photograph only; it does not show the 2026 awards ceremony or its winner. Photograph by Kalai Ramu via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
