The Locarno Film Festival will honor and celebrate the Belgian-born actress Virginie Efira with the Leopard Club Award at its 79th edition this August.
Efira will receive the award in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on the evening of Friday, Aug. 7. In the fest program, she will also present Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden (Soudain), for which she won the Palme for best actress at Cannes and for which she learned to act partly in Japanese.
“Over the past decade, Virginie Efira has become a defining presence in French-language cinema,” Locarno said on Thursday. “In 2023, she earned the César for best actress for Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories (Revoir Paris) and has repeatedly ventured into bold, formally adventurous work with some of the most distinctive contemporary filmmakers.”
Also at Cannes 2026, Efira starred in Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles), another competition title, in which she featured opposite Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Cassel.
“Along with popular successes, Efira’s trajectory has been marked by memorable turns with Dutch auteur Paul Verhoeven and Anatomy of a Fall (2023) filmmaker Justine Triet,” Locarno said. “In Verhoeven’s Elle (2016), and especially in Benedetta (2021), Efira demonstrated a willingness to inhabit provocative, demanding characters whose thorny complexities resist easy categorisation. Her extraordinary performances in Triet’s Victoria (2016) and Sibyl (2019) likewise confirmed that gift and, along with a handful of other remarkable films of that period, secured her status as one of the rising stars of modern European cinema.”
