El-Toukhy on 'Woman Unknown' and Venice's Female Director Gap — SkimNews
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- May el-Toukhy's 'Woman Unknown' follows Marie, a housemaid set to marry her wealthy employer in the weeks before Denmark's 1945 liberation, as she hides her past from a society that punishes women accused of consorting with German soldiers
- El-Toukhy drew inspiration from Svetlana Alexievich's 'The Unwomanly Face of War' and said archival photos of these shamed women are typically labeled simply 'unknown woman' — a deliberate reference point for the film's title
- Venice Film Festival initially selected only el-Toukhy as the lone female director in its main competition before adding Rachel Szor's documentary 'Naza'; el-Toukhy called the imbalance 'a structural problem' rooted in budgets, talent pipelines, and how journalists describe male versus female directors
- El-Toukhy has joined the new Dogma 25 movement and said the current way of making films leaves her 'completely stressed out and exhausted,' calling the sprint-style process 'almost unbearable'
- El-Toukhy rejects likable female protagonists as a matter of principle, having previously directed 'Queen of Hearts' about a woman who seduces her teenage stepson and now centering Marie's morally questionable choices — saying it would be 'a betrayal to my sisters' to portray women only as saints
- The film's historical argument connects WWII-era public shaming of women for 'sharing' their bodies to ongoing practices in modern armed conflicts, a pattern el-Toukhy said is thousands of years old and still 'happening in many armed conflicts' today
Why it matters: Venice's main-competition lineup put a number on a long-running gender gap — one female director — giving el-Toukhy a global platform to argue the imbalance is structural, not anecdotal. Her critique targets budgets, talent pipelines, and the press habits that rarely call a female director a 'genius,' making the festival's near-miss a concrete data point in an industry-wide conversation about who gets to make films.
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