The top prize
Romanian director Florin Șerban's "You Don't Belong Here" (Nu E Locul Tau Aici), a father-son drama set in a small town in which a widower discovers that his teenage son is suspected of a racially motivated murder, won the Golden Leopard, the top prize in the international competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival on August 15, 2026. The jury, headed by Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz, also gave the film a special mention for its young star, Teodor Butănescu, and the picture separately took the festival's Junior Jury and Europa Cinemas Label honors. The film is Șerban's return to feature filmmaking after eight years, and follows his 2010 debut "If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle," which won the Berlinale Grand Prix.
A return for Hong Sangsoo
Veteran Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo won the Leopard for best director for "Nowhere to Lay My Eyes" (Nun Dul Dega Eomne), a family-reunion study that Variety critic Guy Lodge called "as classically and welcomingly Hong as it gets." The award comes eleven years after Hong's "Right Now, Wrong Then" won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. "Nowhere to Lay My Eyes" also gave the festival one of its two best-performance laureates, with Hong's partner and regular muse Kim Minhee taking the gender-neutral prize for her turn as an amateur filmmaker spending an awkward weekend with her estranged mother. Kim previously won the same Locarno honor two years earlier for Hong's "By the Stream."
Acting prize shared with Monica Bellucci
Kim shared the best-performance award with Italian icon Monica Bellucci, honored for her supporting role in Giovanni Tortorici's coming-of-age tale "Ketticè." Variety's Jay Weissberg praised Bellucci for having "few equals in her ability to project self-aware drama queen with just the right dose of camp icon."
Other international competition prizes
Brazilian directors Matheus Farias and Enock Carvalho won the Special Jury Prize for their queer erotic thriller "The Riverbank," tracing the bond between a cleaner and a fisherman on the mangrove-strewn fringes of Recife. Canadian actor Xavier Bergeron received a special mention for his performance in Denis Côté's "Nobody's Violence." Notably overlooked by the jury was "I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming," Isabelle Stever's portrait of a transgender marriage amid the war in Ukraine, which Variety noted is set for its North American premiere in the main slate of the New York Film Festival next month.
Sidebars and industry numbers
Outside the international competition, Argentine-American photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti won the Golden Leopard in the Filmmakers of the Present section for "The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer." The audience award, the Prix du Public UBS, went to Petra Volpe's prison drama "Frank & Louis." Other prizes were bestowed on Beatrice Gibson for "At Night" and on "Revolutionaries Never Die" by Mohanad Yaqubi. Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro described the slate as "vital and contemporary, in close dialogue with the transformations in the industry and in our world today." On the industry side, the festival's Locarno Pro strand crossed 2,000 accreditations for the first time, reaching 2,140 — up 10 percent from 1,940 last year — with professionals from nearly 100 countries participating.
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