You Don’t Belong Here, Florin Șerban’s drama about a Romanian surgeon who loses his grip on his teenage son, has won the Main Prize for Best Film at the 36th FilmFestival Cottbus. The award, worth €15,000 ($16,700) and funded by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, was handed out on Saturday 7 November in the eastern German city, according to the festival’s winners announcement. Vladlena Sandu took the €7,500 best director prize for Memory, her account of a childhood in wartime Grozny, and Natalia Uvarova’s Malika was named best debut.
It is a return for Șerban. His first feature, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize in Berlin in 2010; his second, Box, followed in 2015, and he then spent several years on his educational project, The Film School. The new film, which he wrote, edited and produced through Fantascope Films, runs 154 minutes and is set in Reșița, a declining industrial town in western Romania.
Key facts
- Festival: 36th FilmFestival Cottbus, Germany, 3–8 November 2026; awards presented 7 November
- Main Prize for Best Film: You Don’t Belong Here (Florin Șerban; Romania), €15,000 ($16,700)
- Best director: Vladlena Sandu, Memory (Netherlands, France); outstanding performance: Talha Akdogan, Butterfly Jam
- Best debut: Malika (Natalia Uvarova; Ireland, Kazakhstan, Moldova); first GenNext Award: Drei Kameradinnen (Milena Aboyan; Germany)
- Cash prizes across the festival’s listed awards total €49,500 ($55,300)
The international jury, made up of Polish director Maciej Sobieszczański, German actress Claudia Geisler-Bading, Croatian director Igor Šeregi, ZDF/ARTE editor Urte Fink and Haifa festival artistic director Yaron Shamir, singled out the screenplay’s layers and its pacing, which it said gave the story the pull of a thriller. In the film, the police arrive at the door of a single father, Marius, to link his son Ioan to a gang of teenagers roaming the town at night.
Two titles won more than once. Grzegorz Dębowski’s What Belongs to Others, a Polish drama about a young woman who takes over a dead man’s flat and identity, won both the FIPRESCI critics’ prize and the Ecumenical Jury award; it premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section. Memory added special mentions from the DIALOG and Ecumenical juries to Sandu’s directing award. Her film opened the Giornate degli Autori in Venice last year and won its audience award there, according to the festival’s biography of the director.
Uvarova’s debut competed in GenNext, the new strand for films about young people, but won the cross-section debut award from a jury of students and faculty from the Brandenburg University of Technology and the Film University Babelsberg. The film, which won the NETPAC Award in Busan, follows a 12-year-old in Kazakhstan’s Ingush community whose mother would lose custody of her by remarrying. The jury said its choice came down to the director’s own way of seeing, citing a largely non-professional cast and real locations.
The audience picked Igor Šeregi’s The Wedding (Svadba), a Croatian-Serbian comedy about two feuding fathers. The festival’s programme note says it drew more than two million viewers across the region, grossed $13.7m internationally and, in Croatia, took the box-office record from Titanic. Those are the festival’s figures, not audited box-office data. Šeregi also sat on the feature jury.
The winners
The complete list, as published by the festival:
Feature Film Competition (jury: Maciej Sobieszczański, Claudia Geisler-Bading, Igor Šeregi, Urte Fink, Yaron Shamir)
Main Prize for Best Film, €15,000 (Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg): You Don’t Belong Here (Nu locul tău aici), Florin Șerban (Romania)
Special Prize for Best Director, €7,500 (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg): Vladlena Sandu, Memory (Netherlands, France)
Prize for an Outstanding Individual Performance, €5,000 (Sparkasse Spree-Neiße): Talha Akdogan, Butterfly Jam, directed by Kantemir Balagov (France, US)
Short Film Competition (jury: Ana Dumitrașcu, Jason Giuranna, Mara Tamkovich, Lennart Betzgen)
Grand Prize for Best Short Film, €2,500 (Druckzone Cottbus): Free Eliza (Notes on an Anatomical Imperfection), Alexandra Matheou (Greece, Cyprus, France)
Special Prize for a Director, €1,500 (Tiede+): Mara Cohn, 1H (Romania)
GenNext Competition (youth jury from schools in Teplice, Zielona Góra and Cottbus)
GenNext Award, €5,000 (City of Cottbus): Drei Kameradinnen, Milena Aboyan (Germany)
Further juries and audience awards
DIALOG Award for Intercultural Understanding, €2,000 (Rotary Club Cottbus): The Diary of a Chambermaid, Radu Jude (France, Romania)
DIALOG Jury special mention: Memory, Vladlena Sandu
Award for Best Debut Film, €3,000 (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg and Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf): Malika, Natalia Uvarova (Ireland, Kazakhstan, Moldova)
FIPRESCI Prize: What Belongs to Others (Cudze rzeczy), Grzegorz Dębowski (Poland)
Prize of the Ecumenical Jury (SIGNIS and INTERFILM): What Belongs to Others, Grzegorz Dębowski
Ecumenical Jury special mention: Memory, Vladlena Sandu
Audience Award, €3,000 (Verein für Film- und Medienpädagogik Cottbus): The Wedding, Igor Šeregi (Croatia, Serbia)
MIOB in Shorts Award, €1,000: Beyond Silence, Marnie Blok (Netherlands)
Pickastory Audience Logline Award, €1,000 (Film Center Serbia): Nevena Semova
Promotional Award of the Foundation for the Sorbian People, €3,000: Reiner Nagel, presented on 8 November after a screening of his documentary Štom stejo mrěje – At the End of the Bread Tree
The festival’s awards page also lists a €3,000 Film Promotion Award from the School for Lower Sorbian Language and Culture. No winner for it appears in the results. The twelve cash prizes named above come to €49,500; the FIPRESCI and Ecumenical awards carry no money.
connecting cottbus
The festival’s co-production market, connecting cottbus (coco), held its 28th edition from 4 to 6 November with 13 projects in development and six works in progress. Its awards, announced on the market’s site and reported in full by Cineuropa, were:
cocoPITCH Audience Award, €1,500: Tongues, Tīna Zariņa (Latvia), produced by Alise Gelze (White Picture)
Avanpost Award, post-production services up to €15,000: Svetlana, Vera Pirogova (Estonia), produced by Evelin Penttilä and Kristen Aigro (Stellar Film)
HAVC Project Development Award, €5,000 (Croatian Audiovisual Centre): Something Wild, Zsuzsanna Konrad (Hungary, Ireland)
Producers Network Award, accreditation to the Producers Network at the 2027 Marché du Film in Cannes: White Gypsy, Katarína Gramatová (Czech Republic, Slovakia)
Midpoint Consulting Awards, script consultancy: Teresa, Jan Bujnowski (Poland); Tongues, Tīna Zariņa; Virgin Mary, Lilit Movsisyan (Armenia)
D-Facto Motion WIP Award, €12,000 in post-production services: This Is It, the Apocalypse, Balahan Gürel (Turkey, France)
Studio Beep Sound Post-Production Award, €6,000 in services: Switched Stance, Dániel Füzes (Hungary)
That is €6,500 in cash and up to €33,000 in services, which we report separately. Dollar figures in this article use the European Central Bank’s reference rate of 6 November, $1.1165 to the euro.
Our reading
Cottbus rarely makes a film’s commercial fortune, but its jury choices travel. A main prize for a 154-minute Romanian drama from a Berlin Silver Bear winner gives buyers a credential at the point where the film needs one: before the spring markets and the 2027 festival calendar. Romania arrives at those markets with momentum, after being made the first Country of Focus at the American Film Market, and Radu Jude’s DIALOG win adds to that.
The prize list also splits cleanly between titles that already have a road and those that still need one. Memory and What Belongs to Others arrived from Venice; Malika had already won in Busan. For those films, Cottbus extends a run. For You Don’t Belong Here, it may begin one. The next evidence is whether a sales agent takes it on, and where it plays next.
For the opening of this edition, see our report on Escape Net and the 147-film programme. Related: Ji.hlava’s top prize for Mohabat; Festival dei Popoli’s winners; Tallinn Black Nights at 30.
Sources
- FilmFestival Cottbus, “Meet the Winners of the 36th FFC!”, 7 November 2026
- FilmFestival Cottbus, awards page (prize values and sponsors)
- FilmFestival Cottbus awards release with jury citations and full list, as published by FilmFestivals.com, 8 November 2026
- FilmFestival Cottbus film pages (You Don’t Belong Here; Memory; Malika; What Belongs to Others; The Wedding)
- connecting cottbus, award announcements 2026 (Avanpost Award and others)
- Cineuropa, November 2026. Winners at connecting cottbus