The 79th Locarno Film Festival opened on August 5 with the world premiere of The Green Eyes (Les Yeux Verts), a refugee adventure drama from the French writing-and-directing duo Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh. The film screened on the Piazza Grande, Locarno's open-air venue overlooking Lake Maggiore, following the presentation of the festival's Excellence Award to Isabella Rossellini (The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2026).

The story centres on 11-year-old Chaya, who lives with her family in the Landes region of France, by the ocean. When the family faces deportation, her older brother Nour falls into a deep, mysterious sleep. That sleep is the film's anchor in a real and rare medical phenomenon: resignation syndrome, a condition in which psychologically traumatised refugee children enter a coma-like state of deep withdrawal and unresponsiveness (The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2026).

Liatard and Trouilh said they discovered resignation syndrome a few years before making the film and were struck by the violence of children's reactions to political decisions over which they have no control. One detail in particular shaped the film's imagery: an interview with a child who had woken from the syndrome and recalled dreaming of being inside a glass cage at the bottom of the ocean, where any movement risked shattering it (The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2026).

The directors wrote the screenplay with Guillaume Laurant, the screenwriter of Amélie. Their previous feature, Gagarine (2020), also treated a specific place — a housing project in the Paris suburbs — as a character in its own right. The Green Eyes takes a similar approach: it was shot in the South-West of France, a territory the directors described as a character of the film, as the Landes had been in Gagarine (The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2026).

The cast includes Douae Butarbuch M'Zaouki, Sayyid El Alami, Anamaria Vartolomei, Arcadi Radeff and Omar Al Jbaai. Victor Seguin served as cinematographer; Tina Baz and Daniel Darmon edited the film (The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2026).

The film is a co-production among France, Belgium and Sweden, with production companies June Films, Haut et Court and Les Films credited on the festival programme (Locarno Film Festival). Kinology is handling international sales — the business of selling distribution rights territory by territory to buyers at festivals — and Filmcoopi Zürich will distribute the film in Switzerland (The Hollywood Reporter, 3 August 2026).

For a festival whose Piazza Grande can hold 8,000 viewers on a warm August night, an opening film carries a particular weight: it sets the tone for eleven days of programming and, for sales agents, signals which titles might travel beyond the Alps. The Green Eyes arrived with its subject matter already doing that work — a story about children whose bodies respond to political threat in a way medicine still struggles to fully explain.