Venice Hands Its Golden Lion to a Danish Period Drama, and the Lido Keeps Its Politics

The Venice Film Festival closed its competition with the Golden Lion going to 'Woman Unknown', a drama directed by May el-Toukhy that follows a Danish servant through the uneasy years after the Second World War, according to the New York Times. The same report places Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love' as the runner-up. The Lido's top prize, then, went to a Nordic period piece rather than to any of the Italian titles the foreign press weighed during the fortnight.

The political edge of the programme surfaced elsewhere on the awards list. Al Jazeera reported that 'NAZA', a documentary about Israel's genocide in Gaza, took the Special Jury Prize. That result gave the festival's closing night a second, more contested headline alongside the Golden Lion, and it is the item most likely to travel beyond the film pages.

For the Italian entries, the Guardian's reviewers were unpersuaded. Its critic called 'Scherzetto', Mario Martone's Neapolitan ghost story with Toni Servillo, a 'dithering' and 'part spooky, part sentimental oddity'. Edoardo De Angelis's 'The Fire Within You' fared worse in the same paper, described as an 'overheated family Christmas' that 'boils up too many stereotypes'.

The pattern matters for how the festival is read abroad. Venice has spent recent editions balancing auteur cinema against star-driven spectacle, and this year's jury split its top two honours between a restrained European drama and a documentary on the war in Gaza. Foreign correspondents covering the closing weekend treated the two decisions as separate stories rather than one narrative, which is a departure from editions dominated by a single film.

The Italian competition titles drew attention less for their prizes than for their reception. The Guardian's Venice coverage returned twice to the same theme: Italian directors working in familiar registers. Martone's film was judged to lean on atmosphere rather than argument; De Angelis's, in the Guardian's reading, leaned on southern family caricature. Neither review suggests a film likely to carry Italian cinema into the awards season that follows the Lido.

The commercial consequence of the fortnight now shifts to distributors. A Golden Lion typically lifts a film's international sales and its odds in the subsequent awards cycle, and 'Woman Unknown' enters that market as the festival's principal beneficiary. The Special Jury Prize for 'NAZA' points to a different trajectory: documentary distribution, where festival awards translate into streaming and broadcast deals rather than theatrical runs.

Seen from Milan, the festival's outcome is a reminder of where the Italian screen economy's weight actually sits. The city's advertising, post-production and design-adjacent production houses do a substantial share of the work that ends up on the Lido, and the foreign trade press reads Venice partly as a shop window for that supply chain. A year in which the top prizes go abroad sharpens the question of how much of the value of the festival accrues to Italian production rather than to the international titles that headline it.