Woman Unknown wins Venice Golden Lion; NAZA takes jury prize

May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown won the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice Film Festival on Saturday. Maggie Gyllenhaal chaired the jury. Mathilde Arcel, who plays Marie, also took the Volpi Cup for best actress. Venice rarely gives two prizes to one film. It did so here.

The film is set in Denmark in the summer of 1945. Marie is a housemaid and nanny on the edge of marriage to her widowed factory-owner employer. She is hiding a wartime relationship with a German soldier. El-Toukhy, who is Egyptian-Danish, described the story in her acceptance speech as a tale of women who are invisible, unseen and voiceless. She thanked Gyllenhaal for pointing to the lack of equal chances for female filmmakers and asked the room to use its voice against dehumanization. She dedicated the prize to her teenage daughter.

Woman Unknown was one of only two films in the main competition directed by a woman, and the only one with a woman as sole director. Gyllenhaal had already said, earlier in the festival, that financing remains harder for women and that the subjects women choose are often kept outside the definition of high art. The Lion does not fix that market. It does put a post-occupation Danish chamber drama, made by a woman, at the top of the world's oldest film festival in a year when the slate did not.

The rest of the board was stacked with heavy names. Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love took the Silver Lion grand jury prize. 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 had a hand in producing, won the special jury prize. John Malkovich won best actor for Wild Horse Nine. Best screenplay went to A Good Little Soldier, written by Stephane Brize, Coralie Amedeo and Olivier Gorce.

NAZA arrived in Venice already inside a political fight. On Monday, outlets reported that Israel had threatened to revoke the citizenship of Abraham and Szor over the film. That threat is a separate legal process from the prize. The prize still places a Gaza investigation on the same stage as a Danish fiction about collaboration and shame. Gyllenhaal's jury chose both.

Arcel, collecting the Volpi, put the statuette on the floor because it was heavy and spoke through tears. She credited el-Toukhy for refusing to drop a difficult shoot. Those images will travel with the film into sales meetings. A Golden Lion plus a best-actress cup is a distribution argument. It is also a fact about the story the jury wanted to reward: a servant with a secret, in a country that had just stopped being occupied, directed by a woman who had to argue the film into existence.

Sales agents will now take Woman Unknown into markets that buy Lions first and plots second. A Danish-language period film still needs a distributor who will spend on subtitles and a cinema plan. The double prize lowers that hurdle. It does not remove it. El-Toukhy has a trophy and a financing argument. She still has to book the rooms.

The festival closed on Saturday. The arguments it leaves are not only aesthetic. One is about who gets to finance a film. One is about what a European festival does with a Gaza documentary. One is about a Danish past that still has the power to wreck a marriage plot. Woman Unknown won because the jury put that last story first. The other two arguments will follow the film out of the Lido.