VENICE — When Maggie Gyllenhaal walked to the microphone inside the Sala Grande to announce the Golden Lion, May el-Toukhy already knew she was the only solo female director in the main competition. She did not know she would leave with both the festival’s top prize and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for the same film.
The double victory, awarded to Woman Unknown at Saturday’s closing ceremony of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, had not occurred at Venice for years. El-Toukhy’s period drama won the Golden Lion, while its leading actor, Mathilde Arcel, received Best Actress for playing a nanny whose wartime secret threatens to unravel everything she has built since the armistice.
In her acceptance speech, the Danish-Egyptian director did not sidestep the moment’s political significance.
“This prize comes amid a lack of equal opportunities for female filmmakers in our industry,” she told the audience. “Woman Unknown was incredibly challenging to make financially, logistically, emotionally.”
The film is set in the years immediately following World War II in Denmark. Arcel plays a young woman who, before the occupation ended, had a relationship with a German officer. Now trying to build a new life, she takes work as a nanny for a wealthy older man played by Carsten Bjørnlund, hoping the arrangement will eventually become permanent. That plan collapses when someone from her past surfaces with a claim that would define who she was during the war and who she is permitted to be afterward. El-Toukhy, whose 2019 film Queen of Hearts announced her as a filmmaker willing to pursue the uncomfortable logic of desire and consequence, has made a film less interested in moral verdict than in the machinery by which societies decide who gets to be forgiven.
Woman Unknown arrived at Venice without a confirmed North American distributor. Whether the Golden Lion changes that calculation is the question the film’s producers left the Lido without being able to answer.
Gyllenhaal, who was making her debut as a Venice jury president, built a program of prizes that distributed the competition’s spoils across a range of national cinemas. South Korean director Lee Chang-dong took the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize for Possible Love, his first competition film in more than a decade, returning to Venice with a work that trade press on the ground described as a departure from the social realism of his earlier films. John Malkovich won Best Actor for Wild Horse Nine, a US-Chilean co-production, with Malkovich reportedly in attendance for the ceremony at the Palazzo del Cinema.
The German director Ilya Khrzhanovsky took Best Director for DAU, a project that has traveled through multiple exhibition formats over more than a decade before arriving in competition as a single feature. The Special Jury Prize went to Naza, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in a selection the jury framed around the festival’s traditional interest in political and documentary-adjacent work.
The 83rd edition closed on Saturday, September 12. It had opened ten days earlier with a competition that, once again, had drawn attention to the festival’s gender arithmetic before a single prize was announced. Of the 21 films in the main competition, Woman Unknown was the only one directed by a woman working alone. That figure arrives as the most prestigious of European film festivals enters what its leadership acknowledges is an ongoing conversation about structural access.
El-Toukhy spoke after the ceremony about the Egyptian branch of her family, which her film’s producers say informed the film’s preoccupation with how identity survives across political ruptures. She is Danish and trained in Denmark, but the question of what a woman does with a history her society would prefer to erase is not, she suggested, a narrowly Scandinavian subject.
The festival’s prize-giving is the opening gun for the European festival circuit’s awards season influence, with attention now shifting to Toronto, where the Toronto International Film Festival is in the final days of its own run and where North American distributors who may have passed on Woman Unknown at Venice will be assessing what the Golden Lion means for a film without a buyer.
The full winners list from the 83rd Venice International Film Festival was published by The Hollywood Reporter. El-Toukhy’s Egyptian heritage and the film’s reception were detailed in a profile by The National.
Venice’s top prize has historically served as an early signal for the awards season that culminates at the Academy Awards. As the festival’s final weekend gives way to the broader awards calendar, a season in which television recognition increasingly competes for industry attention alongside cinema, as seen last week when Jean Smart made Emmy history at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, the question for Woman Unknown is whether its Golden Lion can open the North American market that, as of Saturday night, had not yet made a move.
