Isabella Rossellini received the Excellence Award Davide Campari at the opening night of the 79th Locarno Film Festival on 5 August, addressing a crowd of 8,000 gathered on the Piazza Grande — the festival's vast open-air screen in the Swiss town's main square.

The prize, presented annually to artistic personalities who have shaped contemporary cinema, has previously gone to Mélanie Laurent and Guillaume Canet in 2024 and Golshifteh Farahani in 2025, according to the festival's official records (Locarno Film Festival). Rossellini told the audience she was receiving "the excellence prize," a phrase she offered plainly before turning the moment into a family story (Deadline).

Her father, the Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini, won the festival's Pardo — its top honour — in 1948 for Germany, Year Zero. That film, a bleak portrait of post-war Berlin, remains a landmark of neorealism, the movement that stripped cinema of studio artifice in favour of real locations and non-professional actors. Isabella Rossellini's own career has ranged across a different set of registers: from David Lynch's Blue Velvet to her series of short films about the natural world, including Green Porno (2008) and Seduce Me (2010), both of which Locarno screened during this year's edition (Deadline).

The award ceremony was followed by the world premiere of The Green Eyes, the festival's opening film, directed by Fanny Liatard and Jérémie Trouilh. The film centres on a young Iraqi refugee whose older brother falls into so-called resignation syndrome — a condition first documented in refugee children in Sweden in the 1990s, in which children withdraw entirely, sometimes refusing to eat or speak. Co-director Liatard noted that the film was shot in France's Landes region, parts of which had recently been devastated by wildfires, lending the production what she called a double resonance (Deadline).

Rossellini also sat for an onstage conversation devoted to her career on the Thursday following the opening ceremony, as part of the festival's programme (Deadline).

The 79th Locarno Film Festival runs from 5 to 15 August. Darren Aronofsky is also among this year's honourees, receiving the Pardo d'Onore — the Honorary Leopard — presented by the Swiss retailer Manor (Locarno Film Festival).

There is something fitting in the symmetry. Roberto Rossellini came to Locarno in 1948 with a film about a child in ruins. His daughter arrived 78 years later to accept the festival's tribute to a career spent in front of and behind the camera — and the open-air screen that hosted them both is still the same Piazza Grande.