Isabella Rossellini opened the 79th Locarno Film Festival Wednesday night with an award that carries family weight going back nearly eight decades. The Piazza Grande crowd of roughly 8,000 watched the actress accept the festival’s Excellence Award before the world premiere of “The Green Eyes,” a refugee drama that served as this year’s opening film.
Rossellini told the audience the honor left her proud and moved, noting that her father, director Roberto Rossellini, won Locarno’s top prize in 1948 for “Germany, Year Zero,” and that her half-brother, producer Renzo Rossellini, received the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Standing where they once stood, she said, filled her with emotion.
Festival president Maja Hoffmann opened the evening by calling Rossellini’s presence a good omen for the edition. The actress, daughter of Ingrid Bergman and known for roles in “Blue Velvet” and “Conclave,” is scheduled to appear in an onstage career conversation Thursday and will present her web series “Green Porno” later in the festival, which runs through August 15.
The opening film, directed by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, follows 11-year-old Chaya and her family, refugees facing deportation from France’s Landes region. When her older brother Nour falls into a prolonged, unresponsive state, Chaya sets out to reach him, a plot grounded in resignation syndrome, a rare condition documented in traumatized refugee children since it first appeared in Sweden in the 1990s.
Liatard told the crowd the story gained an unplanned second layer of relevance because the Landes region was hit by wildfires in recent weeks, the same area where the production filmed the previous year. She said the fires reinforced how quickly people can lose everything, regardless of circumstance, and that she and her co-director wanted to give individual faces to displacement stories often reduced to statistics.
The cast includes newcomer Douae Butarbuch M’Zaouki as Chaya alongside Sayyid El Alami and Anamaria Vartolomei. Butarbuch M’Zaouki thanked her castmates and the filmmakers from the stage, drawing sustained applause from the Piazza Grande audience before the screening began.
