10/08/2026 - The Romanian director provides some insights into his psychological exploration of the fragile bond between a father and his teenage son

(© Locarno Film Festival)

Florin Șerban – who digs into a family crisis to examine masculinity, the generational disconnect and the illusion of control in You Don’t Belong Here – discusses parenthood in Eastern Europe, moral limits and why he wanted audiences to become silent witnesses, rather than detectives. The movie is currently competing in the Locarno Film Festival’s International Competition.

Cineuropa: Michel Houellebecq once said that parenthood no longer makes sense because the world changes so quickly that parents can no longer pass on meaningful experience. Your film seems to be about exactly this disruption.
Florin Șerban: That was the starting point. But I don’t think this disconnect belongs only to our time. Every teenager feels their parents don’t understand them – I certainly did. Then I became a parent and faced the same struggle.

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Initially, the story was about a single mother and her teenage son. As it evolved, I realised it was also about my generation in Eastern Europe. After communism fell, we suddenly had opportunities our parents never had. We believed the world was ours, so we threw ourselves into careers and [the pursuit of] success, convinced we were securing a better future for our children. Ironically, we often became even more distant from them than our own parents had been from us. This is especially true for men. We become overachievers, believing we can control everything. Yet the harder we try to master the world, the more important things – family, relationships and even ourselves – slip away.

That describes your main character, Marius, perfectly. He wants to control everything, but the world keeps escaping him, correct?
Because the world always escapes us. As adults, we have the illusion that we’re in control, but we never truly are. I could leave this room and be hit by a reckless driver. Life is chaotic. Refusing to accept that chaos is, I think, a particular trait of Eastern masculinity. The film also explores the illusion that we are tolerant. We like to think we are open-minded, but when confronted with people who are different from us, whether ethnic, sexual or social minorities, many prejudices remain.

Your director’s notes mention an acting exercise about a father who feels overwhelming disdain towards his son. Did that become the emotional core of the film?
During a break from filmmaking, I focused on the acting school that I founded. I often ask actors to explore uncomfortable emotional territory. One exercise imagined a father who simply doesn’t want to be near his child. As a parent, that feels almost impossible to imagine. But what happens if your child rejects everything you believe in? If he doesn’t resemble you in values or temperament – or even physically? That became fascinating, dramatically. It’s not that the father doesn’t care about his son; it’s that, on an almost instinctive level, he no longer recognises himself in him.

Let’s talk about mothers as well – in If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, the mum is negligent, and here, she is dead. Is that absence connected to the son's lack of empathy and criminal behaviour?
While researching If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, I spent months in juvenile prisons. Around 90% of the boys I met had grown up without a mother. They came from very different backgrounds, but that absence was a constant. I’m not saying that lacking a mother leads directly to crime, but I do think it can make it much harder to understand the world emotionally and to develop empathy.

The film’s style is almost hyperrealistic. We often observe the father and son separately, as if secretly watching their lives unfold. What was your intention?
I wanted viewers to feel they were peeking through a small hole in the wall, watching reality unfold without me constantly directing their attention through editing or visual tricks. I don’t believe I have a fixed style. Every story demands its own language. Here, restraint felt right because I wanted the audience to become silent witnesses.

Yet you reveal very early on who committed the crime. Instead of letting the audience hesitate and question whether the boy is truly a criminal, the suspense comes from the relationship itself.
That was a conscious decision. I didn’t want a US-style whodunnit, because that distracts from the real questions: what is parental love? How far would a father go for his child? Is his motivation love or self-image? What does masculinity actually mean? I admire Robert Bresson because he stripped away many conventional dramatic devices and forced us to look elsewhere. I wanted to do something similar. We know what happened; now let’s focus on why it matters.

Apparently, many of your actors come from your own film school. How important was that to you?
We’ve spent years developing an approach that doesn’t rely on method acting. Instead, we start with the person. We try to build the character from the actor’s own history, personality and emotional truth. Sometimes, I even write roles specifically for them. The actors playing the son, Marius’s lover and the Roma character all came through this process. For me, the most interesting point is where the actor and the character meet halfway.