Venice Hands Its Golden Lion to a Danish Servant's Story

The Venice Film Festival has awarded its Golden Lion 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. The runner-up award went to Lee Chang-dong's 'Possible Love'. It is a result that will read, in the foreign film press, as a festival turning toward northern European restraint after a competition heavy with Italian entries.

The Special Jury Prize went to 'NAZA', a documentary about Israel's military campaign in Gaza, Al Jazeera reported. The award gives the festival's closing weekend a political charge that its opening had largely avoided, and it places Venice once again at the centre of the argument over what a film festival is for.

For Tuscany, the more immediate fact is the one the festival leaves behind: the Lido empties, the season turns, and the region's own autumn calendar of exhibitions and heritage events begins to compete for the same travelling audience. Venice's prizes are, in a small way, Tuscany's scheduling problem.

The Guardian's Venice coverage this year has been notably cool on the Italian competition entries. Its critic described Edoardo De Angelis's 'The Fire Within You' as an 'overheated family Christmas' that 'boils up too many stereotypes', and found Mario Martone's 'Scherzetto', with Toni Servillo, to be a 'dithering' ghost story — 'part spooky, part sentimental'. Neither took a major prize. The pattern will be read abroad as a festival rewarding formal control over local colour, though the Guardian's reviewers were careful to praise Servillo's presence rather than dismiss the film outright.

That distinction matters in Florence, where the Uffizi and the city's exhibition programme are marketed to the same international visitors who plan autumn trips around Venice's closing weekend. The Local Italy's round-up of twelve exhibitions opening across Italy this autumn and winter, from Salvador Dalí to Artemisia Gentileschi, is the kind of listing that competes directly with a film festival for a traveller's long weekend. The foreign press treats both as the same product: a reason to come to Italy in the shoulder season.

There is a second Tuscan thread, thinner but real. Tuscany's own film infrastructure — the Lucca and Florence festivals, the region's use as a location — depends on the visibility that Venice confers. When the Golden Lion goes to a Danish period drama and the Special Jury Prize to a Gaza documentary, the international coverage that follows is about those films and their subjects, not about the Italian industry that hosted them. That is the quiet cost of a festival that belongs to the world rather than to the country it is held in.

What comes next is procedural. Award winners begin their distribution campaigns, and the Venice titles will surface in the autumn festival circuit and then in cinemas. The Guardian's verdicts on the Italian entries will follow them into those markets, which is the ordinary fate of a film that premieres at the Lido without a prize to carry it.