Venice's Best Actress Was Signing On at a Job Centre Days Before Her Win

The winner of this year's best actress prize at the Venice film festival has said she was on unemployment benefits and had to fly back to Copenhagen to report to a job centre days before her victory, the Guardian reported on Tuesday. Mathilde Arcel won the Volpi Cup on Saturday for her role in Woman Unknown, the drama directed by May el-Toukhy that took the Golden Lion, according to the Guardian and the New York Times.

Arcel told the Guardian that job offers have now begun to arrive. The detail is unusual for a festival whose red carpet normally trades in established names, and it lands a week after Venice's own jury answered criticism over the scarcity of female directors in its main competition — a question the Guardian said the winners' list may have settled.

The New York Times described Woman Unknown as a drama following a Danish servant in the uneasy years after the Second World War. Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love took the runner-up award, and NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, received the special jury prize.

For the Cultura desk the story is less the trophy than the working life behind it. Venice's acting prizes are usually read abroad as a launchpad, and the foreign coverage this week has framed Arcel's win as exactly that: a performer arriving at the Lido from the Danish benefits system rather than from a studio's promotional machinery. The Guardian's account is the source for the job-centre detail; no other outlet in the wire carries it.

El-Toukhy becomes the eighth female director to take the Golden Lion, the Guardian noted. That figure gives the edition its context: the festival had faced heavy criticism over the absence of women in its main competition, and the Guardian's critic argued the winners' list — a Golden Lion, a best actress prize and a runner-up slot for Lee Chang-dong — may have redeemed it.

The NAZA award adds a second thread that foreign desks have followed closely. The film, shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, was produced by the Guardian and examines the systems behind Israel's military campaign in Gaza; its director, Yuval Abraham, said after the ceremony that it was important Israelis watch the film, according to the Guardian's video report. Venice's jury prize thus carried a political charge alongside its artistic one.

What the wire does not yet show is how the Italian film industry reads the result. No international outlet in today's block reports an Italian production among the top prizes, and none draws a consequence for the Venice Biennale's own organisation or for the Veneto's festival economy. The story, as the foreign press has it, remains a Danish one told from the Lido — which is itself the point of a festival that measures its year by which cinemas its winners reach next.