Woman Unknown takes the Golden Lion as Venice's jury flags a thin field of women directors

May el-Toukhy won the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Saturday for Woman Unknown, a Danish film set in the months after the Nazi occupation. Mathilde Arcel, who plays Marie, a housemaid about to marry her factory-owner employer, won the Volpi Cup for best actress. Venice rarely gives two prizes to one film. Maggie Gyllenhaal's jury did it anyway.

Marie is preparing for a wedding and hiding a wartime relationship with a German soldier. The Guardian's critic compared the film to Hitchcock's Rebecca and called it elegantly appointed. El-Toukhy, who is Egyptian-Danish, was the only woman with a sole directing credit in the main competition. She dedicated the award to her teenage daughter and thanked Gyllenhaal for "shining a light on the lack of equal opportunities for female filmmakers." She asked the room to "use your voice to speak up against dehumanization" and said the film was about women who go unseen and unheard.

Gyllenhaal had already said the quiet part at the opening press conference. "There's a systemic problem: it's much harder for women to get their films financed." She asked who decides what counts as high art. The lineup gave her question a number: two films in competition with a woman director, one of them with a sole credit. The jury then put that film at the top of the sheet.

Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love took the Grand Jury Prize, the runner-up award. Ilya Khrzhanovsky won the Silver Lion for best director for DAU. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's NAZA, a documentary on killings in Gaza that The Guardian also produced, won the special jury prize. John Malkovich won best actor for Wild Horse Nine. Best screenplay went to A Good Little Soldier.

El-Toukhy is the eighth woman to win the Golden Lion. That sentence gets written every time it happens because the list is still short. The financing problem Gyllenhaal named sits upstream of any jury. A festival can reward the film that arrives. It cannot invent the slate that was not financed. Woman Unknown arrived as a period drama about a servant's secret, which is the kind of story that still gets called small until it wins.

Arcel put the heavy cup on the floor to speak. The image will travel with the film into sales meetings. What buyers will actually purchase is a postwar Danish house, a marriage that depends on silence, and a director who used the stage to talk about the pipeline that almost kept her out of the building. The Lion is a market instrument. This one comes with a complaint attached.