Isabella Rossellini received the Excellence Award on Wednesday evening, 5 August 2026, helping open the 79th Locarno Film Festival in the Swiss town's famed Piazza Grande. The prize, formally called the Excellence Award Davine Campari, pays tribute to film personalities who have made a lasting mark on the medium (Variety). For Rossellini, the honour lands on familiar ground: her father, the director Paolo Rossellini, and her brother Renzo previously received awards at the same festival (The Hollywood Reporter).

The festival, which runs from 5 to 15 August, describes Rossellini as a figure who bridges scientific rigour and theatrical imagination — she is, after all, the woman who built a second career out of short films and one-woman shows about animal behaviour (Locarno Film Festival). On Thursday, she sat for a public conversation moderated by Olivier Père, the festival's former artistic director who now leads the cinema unit at ARTE France Cinéma and serves on this year's international competition jury (The Hollywood Reporter).

Rossellini did not shy away from the wider world. She called the political situation in the United States "very bad, very hard" and said that she and her family have considered leaving. "We are staying so far, and I hope that things will get better," she added (The Hollywood Reporter). Her primary home is Mama Farm, an organic farm she founded in 2013 on Long Island, New York.

She was equally blunt about the state of moviegoing. "Film festivals are crowded, but local movie cinemas are empty," she said — an observation that captures the divide between the industry's marquee events and the neighbourhood theatres where most audiences actually watch films (The Hollywood Reporter).

On the forces reshaping that industry, Rossellini pointed to streaming, artificial intelligence and other technologies as bringing "a lot of opportunities but also a crisis" for entertainment (The Hollywood Reporter). She also explained her own career choices in practical terms. She does not like television series because they run too long, and she prefers guest-starring roles because a regular commitment would keep her away from home for months. The same instinct is why she stepped away from theatre (The Hollywood Reporter).

What gives the Locarno honour its weight is the family thread. Paolo Rossellini's work as a documentary filmmaker and Renzo's contributions to cinema were both recognised by the festival in earlier years, making Isabella's Excellence Award a third act of sorts for the family name on the Piazza Grande stage.