Venice's Film Festival Ends, and the City Counts What It Costs

The Venice Film Festival closed on Saturday with its top prize going to 'Woman Unknown', a Danish drama directed by May el-Toukhy and set in the uneasy years after the Second World War, according to the New York Times. The runner-up award went to Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love'. The Local Italy noted that el-Toukhy's film was the only feature in competition directed by a woman, a detail foreign critics seized on as the festival's own reckoning.

The Lido is quiet now. What remains is the recurring question the foreign press asks every September: what does eleven days of red carpet, water taxis and hotel occupancy actually leave behind in a city of roughly 250,000 residents, a shrinking share of whom live in the historic centre at all?

That question is not new, and the festival is not its only cause. But the Biennale's autumn edition is the moment the world's arts press turns its full attention to Venice, and this year the coverage arrived alongside the usual infrastructure of a city that lives on visitors.

The festival's own arithmetic is well documented by the foreign press: the Lido fills, the hotels along the lagoon raise their rates, and for a fortnight the city's economy behaves like a machine built for exactly this. The trouble, as international correspondents have long reported, is what happens in the other fifty weeks and in the streets behind the Misericordia, where the resident population has been falling for decades.

The Biennale is not the culprit. It is, in the way foreign critics tend to frame it, the most visible symptom of a city that has been converted into a stage. The film festival, the architecture and art biennales, and the ordinary flow of day-trippers all draw on the same fragile lagoon and the same finite stock of housing, and the argument over how to divide the two has been running in the international press for years without a settlement.

The festival's prize decisions this year gave the foreign press a second subject: the near-total absence of women directors in the main competition, with el-Toukhy the sole exception. That framing, in the Guardian's and the New York Times' coverage, turned a Danish period drama into an argument about the festival itself — a reminder that Venice's image abroad is now shaped as much by what the Biennale does not do as by what it shows.

What comes next is the ordinary Venetian autumn: the Lido emptied, the scaffolding taken down, and the same unresolved ledger of tourism revenue against a resident city that keeps thinning out. The foreign press will return in the spring for the art Biennale and ask the same questions again. Whether the answers change is a matter for the city, not for the festival's jury.