Venice Gave Its Golden Lion to the Only Film in Competition Directed by a Woman. The Jury Says That Is Not Why.

Last week we filed a halftime report from Venice and told you to write down a verdict before Maggie Gyllenhaal's jury handed out theirs. On Saturday night they did. The Golden Lion went to Woman Unknown, a Danish drama about a housemaid in 1945 Copenhagen, and the room did not see it coming. The two films expected to fight over the top prize each took a consolation award. Three of the festival's biggest Hollywood titles took nothing. Here is the board, with the one thing festival coverage always leaves out: when you can see any of it.

The Golden Lion: Woman Unknown

May el-Toukhy is Danish-Egyptian, and this is her third feature after Queen of Hearts, Denmark's Oscar submission in 2020. Woman Unknown is set in the weeks after the Nazi occupation of Denmark ends. Mathilde Arcel plays Marie, a young maid about to marry her widowed employer, a glove manufacturer played by Carsten Bjørnlund. She is hiding a wartime relationship with a German soldier, and someone who knows starts to squeeze her. El-Toukhy has said the film began with a 1940s newspaper photo of a woman with a swastika painted on her back.

The reviews were strong rather than rapturous. Screen Daily called it "ferocious for its muted control" and compared it to Chabrol. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 91 percent, which in this competition put it behind at least four other films. That is what made the win a surprise. Arcel also won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, which Venice rules only allow for a Golden Lion winner if the second vote is unanimous. Per Variety, it was, and Gyllenhaal told the press Arcel "is going to blow our socks off."

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About the elephant in the Sala Grande

Woman Unknown was the only film in the 21-title competition directed solely by a woman, a fact Gyllenhaal had already called "a systemic problem" at her opening press conference. So the first question after the awards was whether the Golden Lion was a statement. Her answer, per Variety, was a deadpan: "I actually didn't see Woman Unknown, I just was like, 'It's made by a woman and so, Golden Lion!'" Then the real one: the film felt "like a laser beam just for the well-made movie that it is."

El-Toukhy is the eighth woman to win the prize in the festival's history, after Margarethe von Trotta, Agnès Varda, Mira Nair, Sofia Coppola, Chloé Zhao, Audrey Diwan and Laura Poitras. In her speech she said the film is, to her, "about the female body as a battle ground."

The two films that were supposed to win

Possible Love: Silver Lion, Grand Jury Prize

Lee Chang-dong's first film since Burning was the consensus critical favorite of the festival, and it still is, at 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Two couples, one working-class and one wealthy, get tangled together when a documentary about laid-off workers starts filming, and every major review singled out Jeon Do-yeon. The Grand Jury Prize is the runner-up award, where juries often park the film they admired most but could not agree on.

This is the winner with the clearest path to you. It opens in South Korea on September 23, in US theaters on October 23, and streams worldwide on Netflix from November 6. It is 164 minutes and already South Korea's Oscar submission. See it in a theater in October if you can.

NAZA: Special Jury Prize

The other frontrunner was a documentary. Yuval Abraham, who co-directed the Oscar-winning No Other Land, and Rachel Szor spent three years filming Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers in secret on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, talking about how the war in Gaza was run. Jonathan Glazer is an executive producer. Its premiere drew a 25-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival's history per the AP, and it also sits at 100 percent. Accepting the prize, Abraham said it was "honestly not very easy to stand here" with politicians and journalists back home "attacking this film, denying it without even seeing it." It runs 80 minutes and has no US release date yet.

The rest of the board

• **Best Actor: John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine.** The one prize nobody argued with. Malkovich plays a dying CIA officer who has stopped filtering anything he says, in Martin McDonagh's Easter Island comedy. He accepted by video from a set in Montreal. He has two Oscar nominations and no win, and Searchlight now has a campaign. Opens November 6.
• **Best Director: Ilya Khrzhanovsky, DAU.** A 195-minute drama about a physicist pulled into the Soviet atomic bomb program across four decades, cut from Khrzhanovsky's years-long immersive project.
• **Best Screenplay: A Good Little Soldier,** written by Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo and Olivier Gorce.
• **Marcello Mastroianni Award: Malou Khebizi, A Place to Heal.**
• Lifetime achievement Golden Lions went to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney.

Who went home with nothing

Primetime, the Robert Pattinson Chris Hansen movie that got a nine-minute ovation and a 94 percent, won nothing. Neither did Danny Boyle's Ink, the opening night film that had climbed to co-frontrunner in the trade predictions, nor Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard, nor the war film Bunker. Venice juries do this most years: the American titles arrive with the loudest ovations and leave with the fewest lions. It rarely hurts them. A24 opens Primetime on September 25 regardless, and Ink goes to Netflix in December.

Does the Golden Lion still predict the Oscars?

Less than it used to. The Shape of Water and Nomadland went from the Lido to Best Picture, and Roma, Joker and Poor Things each won multiple Oscars. Then Almodóvar's The Room Next Door won in 2024 and received zero nominations. A subtitled Danish period drama without a US distributor starts further back than any of those. The Venice film with the strongest Oscar case today is Possible Love, and the strongest performance case is Malkovich.

Meanwhile, in the multiplex

Our weekend guide said the witches would win, and they did, though not by much. Practical Magic 2 opened to about $30 million per Deadline on a $75 million budget, with a B+ CinemaScore and a 37 percent from critics. It ended Spider-Man: Brand New Day's six-week run at number one, but Spider-Man's running total is now $935 million, which puts the all-time domestic record less than $2 million away.

What to do with all this

Four Venice competition titles now have US dates: Primetime on September 25, Possible Love on October 23, Wild Horse Nine on November 6, and Ink on Netflix in December. Woman Unknown will get one soon. Every one of them arrives with a jury verdict already attached. The useful thing is to ignore it until you have your own. Add all five to Shortlist now, rank them head to head as they open, and compare your order to the Lido's when the last one lands. Our movie tier list guide walks through the method. Gyllenhaal's jury needed what she called "long and complicated" deliberations to land on theirs. Yours can take as long as you like.

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