Bold and bravura choices as Venice celebrates A Woman Unknown, Possible Love – and NAZA

Did the Venice film festival just redeem itself on the sexism issue? It made a really good choice for the top prize, giving it to a female director, and it’s a good winners’ list all round.

Having been pilloried for failing to include enough women film-makers, the festival awarded the Golden Lion to Woman Unknown, by the Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, her gripping and stylish drama-thriller about sexual shame, political paranoia and the return of the repressed in Denmark after the second world war.

Mathilde Arcel in Woman Unknown. Photograph: Courtesy Venice Film Festival

It’s a film with an elegant twist of Hitchcock’s Rebecca. A rich factory owner and widower, who preserved his wealth by doing business with the German occupiers, now wishes to marry Marie, the nanny of his infant daughter, played by Mathilde Arcel, who has also won the Volpi Cup for best actress. But this young woman has an awful secret, which arises just as she is taking the white wedding gown of her employer’s first wife to the dressmaker to be altered so she can wear it at the ceremony at her husband’s cold insistence. A very Hitchcockian touch.

It’s a very sleek, superbly furnished and tailored movie, with sharp insights into the sexual hypocrisy of the postwar crime and punishment of collaboration. Some might find it a slightly mainstream, even middleweight film, considering the bold arthouse features elsewhere on the competition list, but it’s undoubtedly a thoroughly good choice and likely to find commercial audiences outside the rarefied festival circuit.

Director Lee Chang-dong with his grand jury trophy for Possible Love. Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/AP

The grand jury prize went to the South Korean director Lee Chang-dong’s expansive, ruminative and novelistic tale Possible Love, the story of a blue-collar family, traumatised by a recent strike at the factory which employed the father, who are befriended and exploited by a wealthy, artistic couple who want to make a documentary film about them. In the hands of another film-maker, this would be a shorter, sharper and more satirical story in which the richer couple’s intentions and behaviour would be more explicitly condemned. But Lee is too subtle for that, and once you have acclimatised yourself to the slower, more noncommittal drift of his address to the audience, there is something strangely addictive in it.

That extraordinary artist and film-maker Ilya Khrzhanovsky got the Silver Lion for best director for DAU, the epic, fictionalised quasi-biopic of the Soviet theoretical physicist Lev Landau. It is the relatively conventional centrepiece of his colossal multimedia project based on Landau, which has spawned installations, photos and many other movies. It is a film on a staggering scale, with real-world analogue stagings and reconstructions – no AI – and part of its mesmeric effect is the mystery of this important but not world-famous scientist becoming the mythic centre of sulphurous Soviet tyranny.

On then to NAZA, a lacerating investigative documentary with a sensational story to tell about the use of AI in Israel’s attack on Gaza, from directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian. NAZA won the special jury prize and for some that won’t be enough, considering the ecstatic 24-minute ovation it received. Gaza and the alleged silence on the same has become a hot-button issue at film festivals – but the point is that Venice certainly fulfilled a most important and non-virtue-signalling function: it scheduled and rewarded a very important film on the subject.

Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham with their special jury prize for NAZA. Photograph: Ettore Ferrari/EPA

The popular hit of the festival was undoubtedly Martin McDonagh’s raucous satire Wild Horse Nine, with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as two bleary disaffected CIA operatives in 1973 Chile, exhausted after a life of deniable wet jobs and black ops. Some were hoping for the top prize for this film: I myself felt a little more conflicted. But it’s great to see Malkovich get the Volpi Cup for best actor, and this puts him in a strong position for the Oscar – and Oscar auguries are traditionally what Venice is supposed to provide, though there has been far less Hollywood glamour and awards-season scuttlebutt on the Lido this year.

A good end to what had seemed a slightly under-par Venice, and it will be great if audiences in the UK and all over the world discover the superb talent of May el-Toukhy.