Venice Closes With a Danish Period Drama and a Gaza Documentary Prize

The Venice Film Festival awarded its Golden Lion to "Woman Unknown," a drama directed by May el-Toukhy, according to the New York Times. The paper reported that the film follows a Danish servant through the uneasy years after the Second World War, and that Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" took the runner-up award.

Separately, Al Jazeera reported that "NAZA," a documentary about Israel's military campaign in Gaza, won the Special Jury Prize on the Lido. The Qatari broadcaster framed the award as recognition for a film it described as documenting what it called a genocide in Gaza — a characterization contested by Israel and its allies, and one the festival's jury did not adopt in its own citation as reported.

The two verdicts, announced within hours of each other, closed a festival that foreign correspondents had covered as much for its politics as for its cinema. The New York Times treated the top prize as a straightforward artistic judgement on a Nordic period piece; Al Jazeera treated the documentary award as a political event. The divergence is itself the story the international press carried out of Venice: a jury prize read one way in the Anglo-American film press and another way in the Middle Eastern one.

The Golden Lion is the festival's principal award and, with Cannes' Palme d'Or, one of the two most consequential prizes in European cinema. Its award to a Danish production directed by el-Toukhy places a non-Italian film at the head of a programme that the foreign press had filled with Italian entries — Toni Servillo's Neapolitan ghost story "Scherzetto," reviewed by the Guardian, and Edoardo De Angelis's "The Fire Within You" among them. Neither took a major prize as reported.

For Rome, the outcome is a reminder of where the Lido's decisions land. The festival is run out of the Venice Biennale, a state-funded institution, and its prizes shape distribution deals, streaming acquisitions and the autumn release calendar that Italian exhibitors depend on. A Golden Lion for a Danish film and a jury prize for a Gaza documentary will be argued over in the trade press for weeks; neither, on the reporting available, delivers the domestic box-office boost that an Italian winner would have.

The documentary prize in particular is likely to travel. Al Jazeera's coverage gives "NAZA" a distribution platform in the Arabic-language market that a festival prize alone would not, and the Special Jury Prize is the kind of award that festival programmers in Toronto, Busan and IDFA watch. Whether the film's subject matter complicates its European theatrical release is a question the foreign coverage has not yet answered.

What the wire does not establish is how the jury reached either decision, whether the prizes were contested inside the panel, or what the festival's own statement said. La Veduta reports the verdicts as the New York Times and Al Jazeera carried them, without the jury's reasoning, which has not been reported in the international coverage available.