May el-Toukhy wins the Venice Golden Lion with Woman Unknown

May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown won the Golden Lion for best film at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival on 12 September. Mathilde Arcel, who plays the servant at the centre of the story, took the Volpi Cup for best actress. A Maggie Gyllenhaal-led jury gave a single film both top prizes, a combination Venice usually avoids.

The film is set in Denmark in the months after liberation from German occupation. Arcel's Marie is a housemaid about to marry her widowed factory-owner employer. She is hiding a wartime relationship with a German soldier. Women accused of fraternising with the occupiers were often subjected to public punishment in those months. El-Toukhy, who is Egyptian-Danish, was the only woman to solely direct a film in the 21-title main competition. She is the eighth woman to win the Lion.

In her acceptance speech she said the film is about the female body as a battleground and a public matter, and about women who are invisible and voiceless. She thanked Gyllenhaal for pointing to the lack of opportunities for women filmmakers, dedicated the prize to her teenage daughter, and asked the room to speak against dehumanisation. The film does not yet have North American distribution.

The rest of the board

Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, also listed in some wires as Promised Love, won the Grand Jury Prize. Ilya Khrzhanovsky took the Silver Lion for best director for DAU. The special jury prize went to NAZA, a documentary on Israel's killings in Gaza directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. John Malkovich won best actor for the CIA comedy Wild Horse Nine. He was shooting in Montreal and sent a video message. Stephane Brize won best screenplay for A Good Little Soldier.

Gyllenhaal had said earlier in the festival that it is much harder for women to get films financed and that work drawn from women's experience is often not treated as high art. Woman Unknown was one of only two films in competition directed by a woman. Some festival reporters wrote that the jury deadlocked over Possible Love and NAZA and settled on el-Toukhy's film as a third option. That account is gossip until a juror puts it on the record. What is on the record is the prize list and the fact that a postwar Danish chamber drama, not the most discussed title of the week, left with the Lion and the actress cup.

Venice still functions as a launch pad for the autumn awards season even when the winner is not an American studio film. Buyers now have to decide whether Marie's secret and the occupation setting will travel. El-Toukhy's previous work, including Queen of Hearts, already showed she can hold a moral trap in a domestic room. Woman Unknown puts that trap in 1945. The prize does not answer whether audiences will sit with it. It does mean the film will be seen in more rooms than a mid-table competition slot would have earned on Saturday morning.