Venice Closes With a Golden Lion for 'Woman Unknown' and a Jury Prize for 'NAZA'

The 83rd Venice film festival closed on Saturday with the Golden Lion going to 'Woman Unknown', a drama directed by May el-Toukhy that follows a Danish servant in the uneasy years after the Second World War, according to the New York Times. Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love' took the runner-up award. The special jury prize went to 'NAZA', directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian.

The Guardian reported that el-Toukhy becomes the eighth female director to win the festival's top prize. The paper's critics, in a separate piece, described the winners' list as 'bold and bravura choices' and argued that a festival which had faced heavy criticism over the small number of women in its main competition may have redeemed itself with its awards.

'NAZA', shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, was described by the Guardian as an exposé of the systems behind Israel's mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The paper quoted its directors saying after the win that it was important Israelis watch the film.

The two awards pull in different directions and the foreign coverage has noted as much. The New York Times treated the Golden Lion as a straightforward festival result, a Danish period drama taking the top prize ahead of a Korean auteur's runner-up. The Guardian, which had a stake in one of the winning films, framed the evening around the composition of the winners' list and the festival's own record on gender, a subject that had shadowed the competition before it opened.

Venice's position as the first stop on the autumn awards circuit gives its jury decisions an unusually long afterlife. A Golden Lion is read by distributors and by the season's other festivals as a signal about which European art cinema will travel, and a director's prize here has often preceded a wider release. The Guardian's own assessment — that the festival had answered its critics — is itself part of that afterlife, since the argument about who wins at Venice tends to be conducted in the press rather than in the jury room.

For the Italian film industry the outcome is a familiar one. Venice is the country's largest annual showcase for international cinema and for the foreign press that covers it, yet the top prizes this year went to a Danish production and a Korean one, with the jury prize to a film produced outside Italy. That pattern has recurred in recent editions, and the foreign coverage of the closing night did not treat it as a surprise. What the festival offered Italy this year was the room, the Lido and the attention, not the trophies.

The festival's feedback wall, a written forum where members of the public record their reactions to what they have seen, drew its own piece from the Guardian before the awards were announced. The paper described it as a place where audiences vent their fury at the movies and at the organisers, and quoted one appeal to a British director to return to an earlier subject. It is a reminder that Venice's public, unlike its jury, is not bound to diplomacy.