Florin Serban '08 took home the Golden Leopard, the top prize in the international competition, at the 79th Locarno Film Festival for his film You Don’t Belong Here. The prize awards the team 92,000 dollars.
You Don’t Belong Here follows Marius who is the chief medical officer at a hospital in his small hometown, raising a teenage son, Ioan, alone after the death of his wife. He is a confident professional, who has no idea what his son gets up to at night, cycling through town, vandalizing cars with a gang of masked vigilantes. Marius's world is shaken when he learns that the police have come to suspect his son of murder. Watch the trailer for the film.
The jury awarded the film “for the strength of its screenplay, the uniqueness of its vision, and its exceptional mastery of cinematic language.” You Don’t Belong Here also won the Youth Jury’s First Prize and the Europa Cinemas Label Award, which will promote the film’s distribution in cinemas within the Europa Cinemas network.
In an interview with Variety, Serban expressed that the most difficult part of any film is the premiere. He shared, “Every single moment watching the film on the huge screen for the first time, literally, it’s like you’ve aged two years. I got out of the cinema drained. I was on the verge of tears.”
The Golden Leopard is awarded to a feature-length narrative film that is making its premiere at the festival. It is awarded to “cinema at its highest level,” which "stakes out new territories for the art of film."
The Locarno Film Festival takes place annually in Switzerland. Beginning after World War II, the festival offered the world, “a stage for revival, freedom of art and expression for talents from all over the world eager to tell stories in new, different ways.” All of the films are screened in their full form, being neither cut nor censored.
Serban was born in 1975 in Resita, Romania. He studied Philosophy and has an MA in Philosophy of Culture and Hermeneutics from Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. He studied film directing in Bucharest at U.N.A.T.C, received a BFA, and later moved to the US. He graduated from Columbia University in NYC with an MFA in Film Directing. With his first feature film, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, he received Grand Jury Prize at 2010 Berlinale together with Alfred Bauer Prize for Innovation in Cinema.
