Danish director May el-Toukhy is bringing her third feature, Woman Unknown, to the Venice Film Festival, where she is one of only two female directors competing for the Golden Lion. Set in a Danish city shortly after the end of Nazi occupation, the film examines the persecution of women who had relationships with German soldiers during the war, framing it as a story about class, complicity and survival told from a female perspective often absent from Second World War cinema.

The film follows Marie (Mathilde Arcel), a nanny and housemaid engaged to her wealthy widowed employer Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), whose wartime affair with a German soldier threatens to resurface and destroy her new social standing. El-Toukhy said the idea developed after she abandoned a planned project on the Reformation-era witch hunts, instead inspired by a republished 1940s newspaper photograph of a woman publicly shamed with a swastika painted on her back. A co-production between Denmark, Sweden and Latvia, the film follows her earlier features Long Story Short (2015) and Queen of Hearts (2019), and she described pouring immense personal resources into completing it, saying she has "used every part of me" to make it.