May El-Toukhy's "Woman Unknown" won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, while its lead actress, Mathilde Arcel, took the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.
Greek cinema also had a strong showing this year. Director Jacqueline Lentzou won the Best Director award in the Orizzonti section and the Edipo Re Award, while the film "Our Share of Sand," co-produced by Greece's Yorgos Karnavas, picked up two further prizes.
Golden Lion for May El-Toukhy
"Woman Unknown," a Danish, Swedish and Latvian co-production, was one of the standout titles in the main competition, winning over both audiences and critics.
Accepting the festival's top award, El-Toukhy said the film was, for her, about the female body as a battlefield and as a public matter, and that it told the stories of women who are invisible, unseen and without a voice.
The story is set in the years after the Second World War and follows a young Danish domestic worker who is preparing to marry her wealthy employer, only for her future to be threatened when her earlier relationship with a German soldier resurfaces.
Only woman directing a fiction film in competition
El-Toukhy's win carries extra weight because she was the only woman directing a fiction film among the 21 entries in the official competition. Just one other competition title, the documentary "NAZA," had a woman on its directing team, Rachel Szor, who co-directed with Yuval Abraham.
The limited number of women directors had been one of the festival's biggest talking points from the start. El-Toukhy called it a systemic problem in the film industry, saying it took her six or seven years after graduating from film school to make her first movie. She said she would like to have more women colleagues alongside her in competition, adding that the #MeToo movement had brought greater awareness of the inequality but that recent years had seen a slide back toward old patterns. Cinema, she said, needs to do better.
Silver Lion for Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love"
The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to South Korean director Lee Chang-dong for "Possible Love," his first fiction feature since 2018's "Burning" and South Korea's official submission for the Oscars.
The film explores work, social alienation and human dignity in an era of rapid technological change, weaving together the stories of two married couples with a documentary about workers who lost their jobs.
Lee thanked everyone who helped bring the project to completion, saying the film would not exist without the waiting and patience of so many people. He said he made the film to ask what cinema can do and what cinema should do at a time when work is disappearing and human relationships are being severed, and that he would take the award as a message to keep asking that question.
Special Jury Prize for Gaza documentary "NAZA"
The documentary "NAZA," by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize. It draws on anonymous testimony from Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers and contains serious allegations about how the war in Gaza has been conducted, including claims about the use of technological systems and artificial intelligence to identify targets and to bomb civilians in their homes.
Abraham said the people who spoke to the filmmakers described the mass civilian losses as systemic, not accidental, but designed. He added that it is the denial of a crime that allows it to continue.
"NAZA" made an impact from its premiere, when audiences greeted it with a 25-minute standing ovation, one of the most striking reactions of this year's festival.
Directing prize for Khrzhanovsky, acting prize for Malkovich
The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Ilya Khrzhanovsky for "DAU," an ambitious project he had worked on for about two decades. The film stars the internationally renowned conductor Teodor Currentzis, with Maria Nafpliotou also in the cast.
The Best Screenplay award went to Stephane Brize, Coralie Amedeo and Olivier Gorce for the French film "A Good Little Soldier."
John Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his role in Martin McDonagh's "Wild Horse Nine," playing an unconventional CIA agent. The performance had already drawn strong interest on the Lido and, according to early reviews, places him in contention for the coming awards season.
Two prizes for Jacqueline Lentzou
Jacqueline Lentzou won the Best Director award in the Orizzonti section for her second feature, "A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra." Visibly moved, the Greek director spoke about the importance and difficulty of independent filmmaking today and thanked the jury for recognising the risk she said she had taken with the film.
She said she had not prepared an acceptance speech and would speak from the heart, about the cinema that is increasingly hard to make for those who want to create free, independent films. She then referred to the real event that inspired her work: the killing of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos in Athens. She said the film was inspired by a real incident in her home country, in Athens, when a police officer killed a 15-year-old child without reason, and she urged people to stop killing children.
The film also won the Edipo Re Award, a parallel prize given by an independent committee to films that take an inclusive and sustainable view on both a human and an environmental level. It competed in Orizzonti alongside 18 other feature films from around the world, a section dedicated to new trends and the most innovative voices in contemporary world cinema. The film is a coming-of-age drama with metaphysical elements, a story of growing up violently interrupted and rooted in the harsh realism of life.
Further recognition for "Our Share of Sand"
"Our Share of Sand," directed by Salini Adnani and co-produced by India, the United Kingdom and Greece, also drew Greek interest. Greek producer Yorgos Karnavas took part in the film through his company Heretic.
The film, which screened in the 41st Critics' Week, won the section's Audience Award. Adnani also received a special mention for direction and screenplay at the Authors Under 40 Awards, one of the festival's parallel prizes.
