Venice Hands Its Lion to May el-Toukhy, and Answers a Question About Women

May el-Toukhy took the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice film festival for Woman Unknown, a drama following a Danish servant through the uneasy years after the Second World War, according to the Guardian and the New York Times. The Guardian notes she becomes the eighth female director to win the festival's top prize. Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love took the runner-up award, the New York Times reported.

The special jury prize went to NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, a documentary built on testimony from Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers about the civilian death toll in Gaza. The Guardian reported a 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere, and published video of Abraham saying after the win that it was important Israelis watch the film.

The Guardian's culture desk framed the results as a partial answer to the criticism Venice had faced this season over the scarcity of women in competition. Its headline called the choices bold, and said the festival may have redeemed itself with its winners' list. That reading is the foreign press's, not the festival's: the paper draws the connection between the prizes and the earlier complaint rather than quoting organisers accepting it.

The two headline awards pull in opposite directions. Woman Unknown is a European period drama with a Scandinavian director and, on the New York Times's account, a servant's story at its centre. NAZA is a work of contemporary investigation, made with a newspaper as producer, and its prize places a film about Gaza's dead at the centre of a festival that has spent the week absorbing political argument alongside its screenings. The Guardian's own coverage of the award sits alongside its reporting on the film's production, an arrangement unusual enough to be worth naming plainly.

What the Italian films did in this competition is not something the international wire states. The Guardian's winners' list and the New York Times's account name the Danish drama, the Korean runner-up and the documentary; they do not report an Italian result either way. For the Cultura desk the useful fact is structural rather than national: the Lido's top prize has now gone to a woman eight times in its history, a figure the Guardian supplies as context for a single night's decision.

Venice's public-facing apparatus also drew notice. The Guardian reported on the festival's feedback wall, a written forum where audiences leave unfiltered verdicts on what they have seen and, at times, on the organisers themselves. It is a small thing next to a Golden Lion, but it belongs to the same season: a festival that awards a documentary about Gaza and a Danish drama about a servant is also, this year, being graded in public in handwriting.