Woman Unknown wins Venice film festival as NAZA takes special jury prize

May el-Toukhy becomes eighth female director to take Golden Lion in festival’s 77-year history, as Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love and Guardian-produced documentary about Israeli intelligence also awarded

Bold and bravura choices as Venice celebrates A Woman Unknown, Possible Love – and NAZA

May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown has scooped the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival , at an awards ceremony that also saw the Gaza documentary NAZA win the jury prize.

Set in the immediate aftermath of Danish liberation from Nazi occupation, the Egyptian-Danish director’s film tells the story of a young housemaid, Marie (Mathilde Arcel), who is about to marry her widowed employer but anxious about him discovering a shameful secret in her past: during the war, Marie had an intimate relationship with a German soldier.

The Guardian’s film critic hailed Woman Unknown as “elegantly appointed” in his review , likening it to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

Arcel also won the festival’s best actress prize, the Volpi Cup, which puzzled some critics: usually, Venice doesn’t award more than one prize a film. Speaking to the press after the ceremony, the jury president, Maggie Gyllenhaal, said they were able to make an exception because the jury’s vote for the Danish actor was unanimous. “She is going to blow our socks off,” she said.

In an emotional acceptance speech, El-Toukhi thanked Gyllenhaal for addressing the underrepresentation of female film-makers at the start of the festival. Woman Unknown was the only film in competition to be solely directed by a woman.

“This film has been incredibly challenging to make financially, logistically, emotionally,” El-Toukhi said. “And what kept me going was the urgent need to illuminate the unknown women of our common history, to make them known. And especially tonight, I feel like I succeeded in doing just that.”

The runner-up grand jury prize went to the Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love , a simmering tale of an unhappy married couple befriended by a documentary maker and her wealthy husband, which drew rave reviews.

The special jury prize, Venice’s equivalent of a bronze medal, went to Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary NAZA , about Israel’s AI-powered mass killing of civilians in Gaza.

The film, which was produced by the Guardian, is based on testimony from 24 Israeli military insiders who are interviewed anonymously at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv. It takes its title from an acronym used by the intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza.

“It’s honestly not very easy to stand here, thinking of all the Israeli politicians and journalists who are now attacking this film and denying it without even seeing it,” Abraham said when accepting his prize.