Isabella Rossellini received the Excellence Award at the 79th Locarno Film Festival's opening night, moved by the recognition of her family's cinematic legacy in the town where her father, Roberto Rossellini, and brother, Renzo, were previously honoured. The ceremony on Piazza Grande also served as the platform for the world premiere of the festival's opening film, The Green Eyes, a drama centred on refugee children in France.

Rossellini told the crowd the award "fills me with pride", recalling that her father won Locarno's Great Prize in 1948 for Germania Anno Zero, while her brother Renzo received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Also unveiled was The Green Eyes (Les Yeux Verts), directed by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh and starring newcomer Douae Butarbuch M'Zaouki, which follows an 11-year-old refugee girl in France's Landes region trying to wake her brother from a mysterious sleep after their family faces deportation; the directors said the story, shot amid the region's recent wildfires, aimed to humanise refugee experiences often reduced to statistics.