Locarno's Golden Leopard Winner Florin Şerban Lines Up Next Film: A Simone de Beauvoir-Inspired TikTok Diary From Romania
Romanian filmmaker Florin Şerban, fresh off winning the Golden Leopard at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival, is already moving forward with his next feature — a story about a young woman escaping a family trapped by alcoholism and violence, told partly through TikTok (Variety).
The new film is titled Ela, or the Diary of a Dutiful Daughter From Romania. Adriana Neagoe wrote the screenplay, which draws inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir's memoir Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. In Şerban's telling, a young Romanian woman keeps a TikTok diary documenting the life she dreams of rather than the one she actually lives — a digital mask over a reality she needs to flee before she repeats its patterns (Variety).
Casting is already underway. The project has received support from Romania's CNC, the country's national film fund. Şerban will produce through his Bucharest-based label Fantascope Films, with Scharf Film and Avanpost as production partners. He was seeking international co-producers at the time he disclosed the project (Variety).
Şerban shared details of Ela with Variety at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where his Locarno winner You Don't Belong Here was screening in the main competition. The 51-year-old director's Locarno triumph was decisive: the film took the Pardo d'Oro — the festival's top prize, awarded at its 79th edition — along with the Junior Jury award and the Europa Cinemas Label, which helps winning films secure theatrical distribution across Europe. Young actor Teodor Butănescu received a special mention (Variety; Locarno Film Festival).
You Don't Belong Here stars Adrian Văncică as a respected doctor at a small-town hospital raising his teenage son Ioan, played by Butănescu, alone after his wife's death. When Ioan becomes a suspect in the murder of a Roma man, the film turns to examine institutionalised racism against Romania's Roma community. Şerban has called it a personal story, shaped by his own experience as a father (Variety).
What makes Ela stand out is the gap between its literary lineage and its contemporary surface. De Beauvoir's 1958 memoir traced a young woman's intellectual rebellion against bourgeois conformity in mid-century France. Şerban transplants that tension into present-day Romania, where the diary is no longer a private notebook but a feed of short videos — the performance of a self that does not yet exist, pressed against a family life that threatens to define her anyway. The TikTok diary becomes both escape and confession.
Whether Ela lands as a festival title or reaches wider distribution will depend on the co-production partners Şerban secures and the territories they can pre-sell — the standard machinery that determines which art-house films reach cinemas beyond their home markets. For now, the project is early: a screenplay, a fund, a cast in formation, and a director carrying momentum from one of Europe's oldest and most respected festivals.
