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.