Danish director May el-Toukhy, the only solo female director in Venice’s Competition this year, links shrinking festival representation to structural industry factors and to a rollback of attention around gender inequality since #MeToo.
El-Toukhy says progress on gender equality since #MeToo has receded and calls for renewed, concrete scrutiny of industry structures.
Budget and access gaps affect which actors a filmmaker can attract and whether festivals program a film, reinforcing a structural disadvantage for women.
Woman Unknown examines post‑WWII social punishment of women, framing the female body as a battleground between private life and public national identity.
May el-Toukhy used her Venice press appearance for Woman Unknown to make a direct argument: the momentum for gender equality that followed the #MeToo movement has diminished in recent years. She said the industry is returning to its prior patterns and urged peers and gatekeepers to ask harder questions about who gets financed, programmed, and promoted.
El-Toukhy is the only woman who is sole director of a film in Competition at this year's Venice Film Festival. Another film in competition has a female co-director, but el-Toukhy's position highlights an unusually low representation of women in the lineup. She described the pattern as structural, not anecdotal.
She said it took six years to get her first film financed after film school, while male peers secured funding faster. That financing gap matters because budgets determine the actors a filmmaker can attract, and cast recognition affects festival programmers' willingness to include a film — a chain that limits access points for women filmmakers.
Her critique of industry narratives
El-Toukhy challenged the persistent cultural framing that elevates male directors as 'geniuses.' She noted she has never read an article that describes a female director in that way and called on peers and delegates to address how the discourse around authorship and talent contributes to gender imbalance.
The film is a post‑World War II psychological drama set in Denmark. It follows Marie, a young housemaid on the verge of marrying a wealthy widower, whose past relationship with a German soldier threatens her new life. El-Toukhy framed the movie as exploring the invisibility and objectification of women, and as an inquiry into why a woman's wartime intimacy becomes treated as a public, punishable offense.
El-Toukhy identified the central theme as the female body as a battleground: after liberation, some women who had relations with German soldiers were publicly punished in brutal ways. She described that punishment as a symptom of a systemic issue in which women's private bodies are read as national territory, and where social and gendered control plays out violently.
Cast, production and festival details
What el-Toukhy asked of the industry
She called for shared responsibility. Rather than positioning women as lone voices, she asked that male peers, festival delegates, and the press be asked the same questions about representation and opportunity. Her remarks connected financing and narrative recognition to festival programming, urging the industry to confront the structural levers that keep female filmmakers at a disadvantage.
May el-Toukhy is in competition at the Venice Film Festival with post-World War Two psychological thriller Woman Unknown as one of just two female directors in the running for the Golden Lion this year. Set in Denmark in the summer of 1945, the picture revolves around nanny and housemaid Marie (Mathilde Arcel), who is
The period film is the sole female-directed entry in this year’s Venice competition, down from six of 21 films last year. Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera called the figure a “historic low in recent years”
The Danish filmmaker, whose post-WWII thriller 'Woman Unknown' premieres in competition Sunday, calls the shortage of women vying for the Golden Lion "a structural problem" that is "as old as cinema and even older than that."
May el-Toukhy says we must end veneration of male directors that causes ‘structural problem’ for women The enduring cult of male genius is keeping down female film-makers, one of the only two female directors in the running for the top prize at this year’s Venice film festival has warned. “I’ve never ever read an artic
The only film by a solo woman director in this year's Venice competition, it shoulders the burden of representing a feminine point of view, whether it wants to or not.
Includes May el-Touhky’s ‘Woman Unknown’ and Cedric Kahn’s ‘15/18’.
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