May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown has won the Golden Lion for best film at the Venice film festival. The awards ceremony also gave the special jury prize to NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary about Israel’s AI-powered mass killing of civilians in Gaza.
Mathilde Arcel, who plays Marie in Woman Unknown, won the Volpi Cup for best actress, making the film the recipient of two major awards. El-Toukhy is the eighth female director to win the Golden Lion in the festival’s 77-year history.
A wartime secret drives the winning film
Set immediately after Denmark’s liberation from Nazi occupation, Woman Unknown follows Marie, a young housemaid about to marry her widowed employer. She fears he will discover that she had an intimate relationship with a German soldier during the war.
El-Toukhy said the production had been financially, logistically and emotionally challenging. She said the film’s purpose was to illuminate women who remained unknown in shared history. Woman Unknown was the only film in competition directed solely by a woman.
NAZA brings Gaza allegations to the awards
NAZA is based on testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders, interviewed anonymously at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Its title refers to an intelligence-service acronym indicating how many civilians are expected to die in an airstrike on Gaza. Read the context: NAZA documentary features testimony from 24 Israeli insiders.
The Israeli military categorically denied the film’s allegations the day after its premiere. Abraham said while accepting the prize that Israeli politicians and journalists had attacked and denied the film without seeing it.
Other acting and festival awards
Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love received the runner-up grand jury prize. The film follows an unhappy married couple who become friends with a documentary maker and her wealthy husband.
John Malkovich won best actor for playing an erratic veteran CIA operative whose cancer diagnosis prompts him to question the morality of his work in Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. Malkovich accepted by video link.
Ilya Khrzhanovsky won best director for DAU, a biopic of quantum physicist Lev Landau. The film’s inclusion had been criticised by Ukraine over actor Teodor Currentzis’s refusal to condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion and funding from a businessman later sanctioned by the US and Ukraine.
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