Venice Closes With a Golden Lion for 'Woman Unknown'

The Venice film festival closed on Saturday with its top prize 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. The Guardian reported that el-Toukhy becomes the eighth female director to take the Golden Lion in the festival's history. The New York Times, reviewing the result, described the film as a drama set in the unsettled aftermath of the war and confirmed the award in its own account of the closing night.

The runner-up award went to 'Possible Love' by the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong, according to both the Guardian and the New York Times. The Guardian also reported that the documentary 'NAZA', produced by the Guardian itself and built around testimony from intelligence officers and soldiers, took a special jury prize. The film takes its title from an Israeli military term for expected collateral casualties; the Guardian reported a 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere earlier in the week.

The Guardian's own festival wrap read the winners' list as a partial answer to the heavy criticism the festival had faced over the number of female directors in its main competition. That framing is the paper's judgement, not a statement by the festival, and it is worth separating the two. What the wire supports is narrower and firmer: a Danish-directed drama took the top prize, a Korean director took the second, and a documentary about Gaza took a jury award.

For the Cultura desk, the interest lies less in the podium than in what the podium says about how the Lido is now read from abroad. Venice has long been the festival the foreign press uses to take the temperature of art-house cinema, and this year the temperature readings were unusually political. A Guardian-produced documentary in the official selection, awarded by the jury and greeted with a long ovation, is not a neutral fact about a film festival; it is a fact about the relationship between a major international newspaper and the oldest film festival in the world.

The Guardian's wrap piece made the argument explicitly, noting that the festival had faced heavy criticism over its lack of female directors and suggesting the winners' list may have redeemed it. The paper's phrasing is careful and conditional — 'may have' — and La Veduta reports it as an assessment rather than a result. The New York Times, reporting the same closing night, stuck to the awards themselves and the films' premises, without the redemption framing. Where the two broadsheets differ, the difference is one of interpretation, not of fact.

Italy's stake in this is the one the foreign coverage itself supplies: Venice as the venue where these judgements are made and then exported. The Biennale's film festival is the moment each year when the world's critics, and now the world's newspapers as producers, write their version of Italian cultural hosting. That the top prize went to a Danish film and the second to a Korean one is the ordinary internationalism of the competition; that the jury prize went to a film made by a newspaper is the newer development, and the one foreign readers are likely to remember from this edition.

What comes next is the awards season the Lido traditionally opens. A Golden Lion is the first serious marker in the long autumn run toward the winter prizes, and the foreign press will carry el-Toukhy's film forward on the strength of Saturday's decision. For readers of Italian culture in translation, the practical consequence is a release calendar: the film now arrives in cinemas abroad with a Venice prize attached, and the argument the Guardian made about the festival's record on women directors will travel with it.