Danish director May el-Toukhy won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival this Saturday for “Woman Unknown,” a historical drama about a maid marked by a secret during World War II, in an edition where only two women competed for the top award.
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The film tells the story of a maid who survived as best she could the Nazi occupation of Denmark during World War II. After the war, she is about to marry the widower she works for, but a secret she carries will endanger her future wedding.
The actress who plays this woman tormented by her past, Danish Mathilde Arcel, won the award for best female performance.
This edition was heavily criticized for the limited presence of female directors in competition. Alongside May el-Toukhy, the other director in the running was Israeli Rachel Szor, who co-directs with Yuval Abraham the documentary “NAZA.”
The eighth woman to be crowned at the festival, May el-Toukhy said upon receiving the award that the film “tells the story of women who are invisible, who are not seen and who have no voice.”
Although it was difficult to bring the feature film to fruition, she explained, “what kept me going was the urgent need to shed light on the unknown women of our shared history, to make them known.” “Tonight, I feel I have succeeded.”
Malkovich in Chile
The Silver Lion, the second most important award, went to “Possible Love,” with which South Korean Lee Chang-dong returned to cinema with a subtle social critique against the backdrop of massive layoffs, eight years after “Burning.”
Russian-born filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky won the best director award for the historical fresco “Dau,” which recounts three decades of brutality and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union through the eyes of Lev Landau, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century.
The award for best male actor went to American John Malkovich — who was not present at the awards ceremony — for his role as a veteran CIA agent in “Wild Nine Horse,” a dark comedy set on Easter Island, Chile, a few months before Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état.
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The documentary “NAZA,” made by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, about the deaths of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, won the special jury prize.
Abraham and Szor, two of the four authors of the Oscar-winning “No Other Land” (2024), show the testimony of 24 members of the Israeli forces who describe how they carried out massive attacks against Palestinian civilians in Gaza using devices created with artificial intelligence.
“The Israeli intelligence officers we spoke with explained to us how this mass killing is systemic: it is not accidental, but designed, actions of murder and policies based on the total dehumanization of Palestinians,” Abraham said upon receiving the award. The documentary, screened near the end of the festival, shook the event and received 25 minutes of applause, a record in the history of the festival according to specialized press.
Glamour and triumph of Latin American cinema
Although Hollywood studios were largely absent from this edition of the festival, there was no shortage of glamour on the red carpet.
Among those who shone the most at the Lido were Spaniards Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, one of the most charismatic couples in world cinema. In “Bunker,” by French director Florian Zeller, they play a couple in crisis after nearly two decades of relationship.
British actor Robert Pattinson also attracted all the attention in the role of a controversial pedophile hunter journalist in “Primetime.” Latin American cinema, scarce in the official selection, triumphed in the parallel sections dedicated to new talents.
Argentine film “Sometimes I Feel Sadness, Other Times Rebellion,” by María Aparicio, won the top award at the Giornate degli Autori. Colombians Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas were awarded at the Critics’ Week for their experimental documentary “The End of Times,” made with archival material and AI-generated images.
And the Brazilian film “London,” by Victor di Marco and Márcio Picoli, won the Queer Lion ex aequo with “Queer Edward II,” by Theo Rollason, for the best work on homosexual themes and culture among all the titles present at the festival.
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