Venice Hands Its Lion to a Story About Invisible Women

The Venice Film Festival awarded its top prize on Saturday to Woman Unknown, a Danish-made drama directed by May el-Toukhy, about a servant in the uneasy years after the Second World War. According to Le Monde, the Danish-Egyptian director paid tribute to invisible and voiceless women. The New York Times reports that Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love took the runner-up award. The Guardian noted that it was the only feature in competition with a female director.

Le Monde also described the edition as politically charged, and the citations bear that out: a Silver Lion dedicated to Ukrainians fighting for freedom, a Special Jury Prize for a documentary about civilians killed by the Israeli army in Gaza. This is the Venice the foreign press has grown used to — a festival that functions as a stage for arguments it did not invent, staged in a city that has its own reasons to understand the difference between spectacle and survival.

For Italian cinema the week was quieter. The Guardian's review of Scherzetto found Toni Servillo bringing gravitas to a dithering Neapolitan ghost story, a film it judged part spooky and part sentimental. The Board takes no view on the film. We note only the pattern: when the world's critics gather here, the Italian entry is often the local colour, and the prizes travel north.

That is not a complaint about juries. It is an observation about what Venice has become in the international imagination — less a showcase for a national cinema than a neutral ground on which the world's quarrels are given a red carpet and a fortnight of attention. The city lends its light and its palazzi to other people's stories, and is paid in the currency it most needs. Whether that bargain still serves Venice is a question the festival's own programme did not ask.