Venice 2026: Golden Lion for ‘Woman Unknown’ Closes Festival Shadowed by War and Controversy

Woman Unknown is set in Denmark in the summer of 1945, shortly after liberation from Nazi occupation. Its central character, Marie, is a 24-year-old housemaid hiding a wartime relationship with a German soldier and the loss of a pregnancy as she prepares to marry her wealthy widowed employer.

It is a story about the period after the fighting has stopped, when societies begin deciding who is to blame, who deserves punishment and which memories are allowed to survive.

In Denmark, women accused of relationships with German soldiers were publicly humiliated after the war. Some had their heads shaved and were subjected to social ostracism. The treatment became part of the wider reckoning that followed liberation.

That history gives the Golden Lion a resonance beyond the film's immediate subject. Venice chose a drama about the private consequences of occupation at a festival where questions of occupation, war and responsibility were being argued in real time.

There was also a very contemporary dimension to the jury's decision. El-Toukhy was the only woman with a solo-directed film among the 21 titles in the main competition. Her victory therefore lands against a familiar criticism of Venice: that the festival has promised greater gender balance without consistently delivering it in the competition itself.

El-Toukhy is now the eighth female director in Venice history to win the Golden Lion.

Arcel's award made the result even more unusual. Festival rules generally prevent one competition film from collecting more than one major prize. The jury chose to make an exception after unanimously supporting Arcel's performance in her first leading feature-film role.

There is a practical message in that decision too. Institutional rules are useful until a jury decides that an individual performance is too strong to leave unrecognised. In this case, Venice was prepared to make its own rules less important than the judgement of the jury.

A documentary that moved beyond the cinema

The most politically explosive award went to NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

The film is built around anonymous night-time interviews with 24 Israeli military insiders in Tel Aviv. It examines the use of artificial intelligence in selecting targets in Gaza. Its title refers to an Israeli military intelligence acronym concerning expected civilian casualties from an airstrike.

The documentary was always likely to provoke a response. Its Special Jury Prize ensured that the response would not remain confined to film critics.

After the premiere, Abraham criticised Israeli political and media figures who had attacked the film without seeing it. The Israeli military then issued a formal statement categorically denying the allegations made in the documentary.

That sequence matters because of where it happened. Venice gave testimony from anonymous military insiders a stage that investigative journalism alone might not have provided. The jury did not establish the truth of the film's claims, and an award is not an independent verification of them. But the decision made the documentary part of a much larger international argument over how Israel conducts military operations and how technology is being used to determine targets in Gaza.

For European cultural institutions, this is an increasingly difficult territory.

A film festival can select a documentary because its jury considers it important cinema. Once the film concerns an active war, however, that decision can have consequences well beyond cinema.

The Russian question came to Kharkiv

The dispute over DAU was different but arguably even more difficult for Venice.

Before the festival, Ukraine's Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs jointly opposed the film's inclusion and called for a boycott. Their objections concerned Russian state-adjacent funding structures, older production networks and the position of lead actor Teodor Currentzis, who had not publicly condemned Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The festival did not remove the film.

The jury then gave Khrzhanovsky the Silver Lion for Best Director.

DAU is an unusual project in any case. It is based on the life of Soviet quantum physicist Lev Landau and the pressure to work on the USSR's nuclear weapons programme. Much of the project was filmed in Kharkiv between 2008 and 2011. Khrzhanovsky renounced his Russian citizenship in 2024.

Then came the moment that made the award harder to interpret in simple political terms. Khrzhanovsky dedicated it to Kharkiv and to Ukrainians fighting for freedom, peace and victory.

For Kyiv, the award was still a setback. Its diplomatic request had been ignored. But Khrzhanovsky's speech also prevented the result from being read simply as an endorsement of Russian cultural power.

That is precisely the problem now confronting European festivals.

Ukrainian cultural diplomacy has sought to draw a line between Russian culture and the structures that sustain Russia's war. Venice, by contrast, effectively left the jury to make its own distinction between a controversial production history and the artistic work submitted to the competition.

There is no easy institutional solution. If festivals accept government demands that certain films cannot be shown, their claim to curatorial independence weakens. If they ignore those demands, they can be accused of treating the political circumstances surrounding a work as irrelevant.

For Venice, DAU showed that the two positions are no longer easily separated.

Korean cinema offers a different story

Amid all this, Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love won the Grand Jury Prize, giving South Korea a major Venice podium finish for the first time since Kim Ki-duk's Golden Lion for Pieta in 2012.

The award is significant in its own right, but its route to audiences is equally notable. Possible Love secured international distribution through Netflix, linking the old prestige economy of the European festival circuit with the global reach of a streaming platform.

That is another reason Venice still matters. A prize on the Lido can turn a film into an international commercial proposition almost overnight.

The other major awards were more conventional: John Malkovich won Best Actor for Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine, accepting by video link, while Malou Khebizi received the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor. Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo and Olivier Gorce won Best Screenplay for Un bon petit soldat.

But the political disputes surrounding the festival made even the conventional prizes part of a larger conversation about what gets visibility on one of Europe's most influential cultural stages.

The old idea of the neutral festival

Venice was founded in 1932 and remains one of the world's most prestigious film festivals. Its influence rests partly on a long-established division of labour: governments conduct foreign policy, while festivals select films.

That division is becoming harder to maintain.

The pressure does not come from one side. Ukrainian officials want festivals to account for Russia's war and the networks surrounding Russian cultural production. Israeli authorities are confronted with documentaries making allegations about military operations. Industry organisations continue to challenge festivals over the representation of women. Audiences themselves are being given more room to react, including through Venice's new public Feedback Wall.

The result is a festival that increasingly resembles a political forum without formally becoming one.

That creates a particular problem for its juries. Their decisions are still supposed to be about films. Yet the subjects of those films increasingly involve governments, armies, occupation, intelligence services and historical responsibility. A jury can insist that it is judging artistic work, but it cannot control what that judgement means once it leaves the festival.

This year's awards made that especially clear.

The Golden Lion went to a film about the social scars left by occupation. A documentary about military intelligence and AI targeting received a major award and drew an official military rebuttal. A director whose film had been targeted by a Ukrainian boycott campaign won the Best Director prize and used the podium to speak about Kharkiv.

None of those decisions needed Venice to declare a political position.

The politics was already there.