May el-Toukhy Takes ‘Woman Unknown’ to Venice: “I’ve Used Every Part of Me to Make This Film”
Developed over time first seen 2 months ago
Danish director May el-Toukhy is presenting her third feature, Woman Unknown, in competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, making her one of only two women vying for the top prize this year. Set in a Danish city in the months after the Second World War, the film follows Marie, a nanny about to marry her wealthy widowed employer, whose wartime relationship with a German soldier threatens to expose her to public shame and punishment. El-Toukhy describes the project as a deliberate corrective to decades of war cinema told from men's perspectives, and says the demanding shoot took a heavy personal and financial toll.
The idea grew out of an abandoned project on Reformation-era witch hunts, which el-Toukhy dropped after losing interest in the perpetrators; she and co-writer Maren Louise Käehne were instead struck by a republished 1943 propaganda photograph of a woman with a swastika painted on her back, which redirected them towards the plight of women who had relationships with occupying soldiers. A Denmark-Sweden-Latvia co-production made on a tight budget, the film stars Mathilde Arcel as Marie and Carsten Bjørnlund as her fiancé, and follows el-Toukhy's earlier features Long Story Short (2015) and Queen of Hearts (2019). She told The Hollywood Reporter she worked 16-hour days for over a year and spent all her savings making the film, adding that she already feels she has "won" simply by completing it before arriving on the Lido.
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In short
- May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown competes for Venice's Golden Lion.
- Film centres on a Danish woman's affair with a German soldier post-WWII.
- Director says she spent all her savings and worked 16-hour days.
How this story developed
- 2 months ago New details from May el-Toukhy's Venice interview reveal the toll of making Woman Unknown: the Danish director says she worked 16-hour days for more than a year and spent all her savings on the film, a Denmark-Sweden-Latvia co-production made economically despite rising filmmaking costs.
- 2 months ago Danish director May el-Toukhy is presenting her third feature, Woman Unknown, in competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, making her one of only two women vying for the top prize this year.
- 2 months ago 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.
Full account
Danish director May el-Toukhy has brought her third feature, Woman Unknown, to this year's Venice Film Festival, where she is one of only two women directing films in the main Golden Lion competition. Shot with the restrained, precise aesthetic associated with Scandinavian cinema, the film examines a subject el-Toukhy felt had been largely overlooked: the punishment meted out to women accused of consorting with German occupying soldiers in the final months of the Second World War, and in the aftermath of liberation. Both reports frame the project as a deliberately female-centred corrective to a genre long dominated by men's wartime experiences.
El-Toukhy has described a winding path to the story. She initially planned a film about the witch hunts that followed the Reformation, but lost interest once she began researching the men who carried them out, finding their motives comparatively flat and lacking the moral ambiguity she is drawn to as a writer. The project changed direction after she came across a 1940s newspaper photograph of a woman sitting with a swastika daubed on her back. Working with co-writer Maren Louise Käehne, el-Toukhy turned instead to the women labelled 'horizontal collaborators', arguing that female bodies became a kind of battleground for national identity during and after the occupation, a history she felt Denmark had never properly confronted. She has also pointed to the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich's oral history of women in wartime as an influence on the film's approach and its title, noting that many of the surviving archival photographs of such women are simply captioned 'unknown woman'.
The film follows Marie, a young nanny and housemaid on the verge of marrying her wealthy, widowed employer, Christian, in a Danish city that has just emerged from Nazi occupation. Marie is concealing a wartime affair with a German soldier, a secret that threatens to unravel her engagement and her hard-won social position as the chaos of liberation exposes and punishes women like her. El-Toukhy has framed the story as concerned as much with the euphoria and vengefulness of a newly freed Europe as with the specific sexual shaming directed at women, drawing a line between this history and the public humiliation of women in conflicts up to the present day.
Coverage of el-Toukhy's Venice appearance has also dwelt on the personal toll of making the film and on the wider debate over women's representation at the festival. She has spoken of working sixteen-hour days for over a year, exhausting her savings, and pouring everything she has into the production, a Danish, Swedish and Latvian co-production that followed her earlier features Long Story Short and Queen of Hearts. Separately, she has been outspoken about Venice's initial selection of only one woman director for the main competition (before the documentary Naza, co-directed by Rachel Szor, was added), calling it evidence of a structural problem in funding and opportunity for female filmmakers, and noting that critics rarely apply the label 'genius' to women directors as they do to men. She frames Woman Unknown itself as a way of opening up that conversation, even as she welcomes the recognition of being in competition.
Where outlets differ
From the full account, which is AI-written from the sources:
The Hollywood Reporter centres its account on production logistics and the director's personal exhaustion — the casting search for the lead, the Denmark/Sweden/Latvia co-production, budget constraints, her filmography, and an extended quote about working herself to the point of depletion — while giving less space to the festival's gender-representation controversy.
The second outlet (Variety) foregrounds the film's intellectual and literary genesis, quoting el-Toukhy at length on Svetlana Alexievich's 'The Unwomanly Face of War' and the term 'horizontal collaborator', and devotes substantial space to the row over Venice including only one female director in competition, plus her remarks on double standards in how male and female directors are described (e.g. the word 'genius').
There is a minor discrepancy in the film's title as rendered across the two reports — 'Woman Unknown' versus 'Women Unknown' — with the singular form appearing to be correct given the plot summary.
Only Variety details the addition of the documentary Naza, co-directed by Rachel Szor, as the festival's response to criticism over the lack of female directors.
Explained simply
The Venice Film Festival is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious film events, held annually in Italy, where films compete for its top prize, the Golden Lion. Female directors have long been under-represented in the festival's main competition, a point of ongoing discussion within the industry, which is relevant to why the presence of women among this year's contenders draws particular attention.
The film's subject matter draws on a real but lesser-known chapter of the Second World War. When Nazi Germany's occupation of Denmark ended in 1945, women who had formed relationships with German soldiers during the war faced public humiliation and violence from their communities, often having their heads shaved or being paraded in public as a form of retribution. This period is not as widely explored in film as other aspects of the war, and is generally examined from perspectives other than those of the women involved.
May el-Toukhy is a Danish filmmaker known for previous features exploring personal and social tension, and works in this case as part of a co-production spanning several countries, reflecting how European film financing often pools resources across borders. Her latest work places a domestic story, centred on a woman's engagement to a wealthy widower, against this backdrop of wartime reprisal, using it to explore themes of class and social standing in postwar society.
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