Florin Şerban’s You Don’t Belong Here has won the Golden Giraldillo for best film at the 23rd Seville European Film Festival. The juries’ decisions were read out on the morning of Saturday 14 November at the Teatro Lope de Vega, on the last day of the 6–14 November festival. Iranian director Mohsen Gharaei’s Falling House (Casa en ruinas) took the grand jury prize, and Sweden’s Oscar entry Adult Supervision won both the Puerta América award and best actor.
For the Romanian drama it is a third top prize in three months. It won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in August and, a week before Seville, the €15,000 main prize at FilmFestival Cottbus in Germany. For Reason8 Films, the UK company handling its world sales, that run of jury verdicts is now the strongest argument for a demanding 154-minute film told largely in long, unbroken takes.
Key facts
- Event: 23rd Seville European Film Festival, 6–14 November 2026; awards announced on the morning of 14 November; the winning films were screened again at the Teatro Alameda on 15 November
- Golden Giraldillo: You Don’t Belong Here, Florin Şerban (Romania), which also won best art direction for Bogdan Ionescu
- Grand jury prize: Falling House (Casa en ruinas), Mohsen Gharaei (Iran, US, Germany), which also won best editing
- FilmBunch count of the official palmarès: 35 awards and mentions, from the Official Section to five partner juries; eight of the 17 competition features won an award or mention and nine won nothing
- The festival did not say whether any of the prizes carries cash
The competition
The Official Section jury was chaired by the screenwriter Howard A. Rodman, vice-president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He sat with San Sebastián festival director José Luis Rebordinos, the producers Lisa Marie Russo and Denise O’Dell, and the Spanish director Miguel Ángel Vivas.
You Don’t Belong Here follows Marius, a widowed doctor who runs the hospital in the western Romanian town of Reșița and is raising his teenage son alone, until the police come to suspect the boy of taking part in the killing of a Roma man. Adrian Văncică plays the father and Teodor Butănescu the son. Şerban wrote, produced and edited the film for his Bucharest company, Fantascope Films. The jury called it a lucid study of life in Reșița and of the long-term consequences of intolerance, and gave a second prize to Bogdan Ionescu for a production design it said never draws attention to itself.
The film marks Şerban’s return to directing after several years spent teaching. He co-founded Școala de Film in Bucharest, and the story grew out of a scene he wrote there for an acting class. His debut, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, won the Silver Bear grand jury prize at the Berlinale in 2010.
Gharaei’s Falling House, co-written with Amirmohammad Abdi, is an Iranian, American and German co-production. A prison guard dismissed for corruption locks his own family inside a house marked for demolition after he learns that his eldest daughter plans to leave the country to work as a model. Besides the grand jury prize, it won best editing for Evelyn Rack and Emad Khodabakhsh. The film premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice, and its sales company, Paradise City Sales, has sold it to Jokers Films for France, Wanted Cinema for Italy and Karma Films for Spain, Variety reported on 15 November.
The other jury prizes were spread across the field. Tommaso Landucci was named best director for Children of the Monkey, the story of a father who cannot accept his severely disabled son; the jury noted that it is his first feature. Alejandro Hernández and Michel Gaztambide won best screenplay for El director, Dani de la Orden’s adaptation of the book in which the former El Mundo editor David Jiménez recounts his years running the newspaper. Melania Cruz won best actress for Tralovento, Eloy Domínguez Serén’s first fiction feature, as a woman who returns to rural Galicia and takes on a wind farm planned for common land.
Gustaf Skarsgård, Fares Fares and Linus Wahlgren shared best actor as the fathers who chaperone a school trip in Alex Schulman’s Adult Supervision. The same film won the Puerta América award, given for the third time and contested only by films that their countries have put forward for the international feature Oscar. Its two-member jury, Lukas Ettlin and Nuria González Blanco, gave a special mention to Austria’s entry, Markus Schleinzer’s Rose, starring Sandra Hüller. Noé Bach won best cinematography for Elephants in the Fog, Abinash Bikram Shah’s first feature and, according to Variety, Nepal’s submission for the same Oscar.
Nine competition films went home empty-handed, among them Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter, Arthur Harari’s La desconocida (L’Inconnue), Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert’s The Idiot(s) and Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s Black Money for White Nights.
Outside the competition
Mohanad Yaqubi’s Revolutionaries Never Die, a documentary built on the work of the Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, won the Embrujo section. Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu’s debut House of the Wind, a co-production led by Cameroon, won Rampa. Lukas Dhont’s Coward took the audience award in the European Film Academy selection and shared the Ocaña queer prize with La bola negra, the Spanish film that has 10 European Film Award nominations. In the Andalusian panorama, the Juan Antonio Bermúdez awards went to David Martín de los Santos’s Un hombre en un puente for fiction and María Molina Peiró’s Como todo mortal for documentary.
Full list of winners
From the festival’s official palmarès. English titles are used where the festival or the film’s sales company uses one.
Official Section (competition jury) – Golden Giraldillo for best film: You Don’t Belong Here, Florin Şerban – Grand jury prize: Falling House (Casa en ruinas), Mohsen Gharaei; screenplay by Mohsen Gharaei and Amirmohammad Abdi – Best director: Tommaso Landucci, Children of the Monkey – Best screenplay: Alejandro Hernández and Michel Gaztambide, El director – Best actress: Melania Cruz, Tralovento – Best actor: Gustaf Skarsgård, Fares Fares and Linus Wahlgren, Adult Supervision – Best editing: Evelyn Rack and Emad Khodabakhsh, Falling House – Best cinematography: Noé Bach, Elephants in the Fog – Best art direction: Bogdan Ionescu, You Don’t Belong Here – Mention for creativity: Blaise, Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue – Best animated short: Gently, Jamaica Kindlová – Best live-action short: Fresh Cut, Hadrien Bels
Puerta América award (Oscar submissions) – Award: Adult Supervision, Alex Schulman – Special mention: Rose, Markus Schleinzer
Embrujo – Best film: Revolutionaries Never Die, Mohanad Yaqubi – Special mention: Ulya, Viesturs Kairišs
Rampa – Best film: House of the Wind, Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu – First special mention: Lover, Not a Fighter, Martina Buchelová – Second special mention: Marie Madeleine, Gessica Généus
Alumbramiento – Best film: Four Minus Three, Adrian Goiginger
Panorama Andaluz – Juan Antonio Bermúdez award, fiction: Un hombre en un puente, David Martín de los Santos – Juan Antonio Bermúdez award, documentary: Como todo mortal, María Molina Peiró – Special mention, documentary: 200 vidas. Paco Rabal, Vanesa Benítez – Rosario Valpuesta award for best short: Stellzz2000, Rosendo M. Diezma – Rosario Valpuesta special award for artistic contribution: OAO, Rocío Mesa
Audience and youth awards – Audience award, European Film Academy selection: Coward, Lukas Dhont – Cinéfilos del Futuro award: In Waves, Phuong Mai Nguyen – Europa Junior award: Momonsters. La película de Navidad, Javier Martínez and Christian Garnez
Partner juries – ASECAN best feature screenplay: Remedios Malvárez and Adelfa Calvo, Acuérdate de mí – ASECAN best short screenplay: Álvaro León, ¿Qué comen los dragones? – APSA mention for best sound in a Spanish film: Monstro, Andrés Goteira (sound team Juan Gay, David Machado, Javier Pato and Óscar Nieto) – AAMMA Women in Focus award: Roya, Mahnaz Mohammadi – Ocaña queer award for freedom (shared): La bola negra, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi; Coward, Lukas Dhont – University of Seville European screenplay prize, first prize: El sonido sordo del frontón, Pablo Ignacio Roncero Garrido – University of Seville European screenplay prize, second prize: Luis Spinetta que estás en los cielos, Cristina Martín Núñez
The competition line-up and the festival’s opening programme are in our preview of this year’s edition.
Our reading
Reason8 now has three top jury prizes, from Locarno, Cottbus and Seville, to put in front of buyers wherever You Don’t Belong Here is still unsold; neither the festival nor the sales company has announced distribution deals so far. Falling House goes into the same conversations with three European territories already closed. For Adult Supervision, Rose and Elephants in the Fog, the more important verdict comes in December, when the Academy cuts the international feature race to a 15-title shortlist. In Italy, the Lecce festival of European cinema named its winners on the same day.
Sources
- Festival de Sevilla, Palmarés 2026 (official list of awards)
- Festival de Sevilla, La película rumana ‘You Don’t Belong Here’, Giraldillo de Oro, 14 November 2026
- Variety, Seville European Film Festival prizes, 15 November 2026 (sales on Falling House and Adult Supervision)
- Cineuropa, You Don’t Belong Here triumphs at the 36th FilmFestival Cottbus, 9 November 2026
- Screen International, Florin Serban’s You Don’t Belong Here wins Golden Leopard at Locarno 2026, 15 August 2026
- Reason8 Films, You Don’t Belong Here film page
- Cineuropa, You Don’t Belong Here (Nu e locul tau aici) film card
- Festival de Sevilla, Sección Oficial 2026 (competition titles)