The Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy won the Golden Lion for best film at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, with Woman Unknown (Kvinde, ukendt). The winners were announced on the festival’s closing day, Saturday 12 September 2026, and the same film also took the Volpi Cup for best actress, awarded to Mathilde Arcel.
The prize is the highest honour of one of the oldest film festivals in the world, and it comes to a director who is still relatively early in her feature career. Woman Unknown is only her third feature. The festival, which ran from 2 to 12 September, had a competition jury chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal and including the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania.
The film that won
Woman Unknown is set in Denmark in the years after the Second World War. It follows a housemaid who hides a part of her past before marrying her wealthy employer. It is a Danish, Swedish and Latvian co-production. Wikipedia notes that it was the only film by a woman director initially included in the main competition, which makes the result stand out.
The double result, best film and best actress, shows how closely the two prizes were tied to one film: the Golden Lion went to the director, and the Volpi Cup to her lead.
A Danish-Egyptian beginning
El-Toukhy was born on 17 August 1977 in Charlottenlund, Denmark, and grew up in Herlev. Her father is an Egyptian engineer who came to Denmark in 1973, and her mother is Danish. After school she lived in Egypt for six months with her grandmother.
The National counted her among the directors of Arab origin selected for Venice this year, describing her as Danish-Egyptian. Five films by Arab directors were chosen for the festival, and hers was the one in the main competition to win the top prize. For a filmmaker whose career has been spent in the Danish and European film industries, the prize also gives Arab heritage a visible place at the very top of European auteur cinema.
Training and television
She completed the production programme at the Danish National School of Performing Arts in 2002, and graduated as a film director from the National Film School of Denmark in 2009. Her feature debut, Long Story Short (Lang historie kort), followed in 2015.
Television fills much of her record. She directed episodes of the Danish series The Legacy (Arvingerne, 2017), Ride Upon the Storm (Herrens Veje) and Cry Wolf (Ulven kommer, 2020). She later directed four episodes of the Netflix series The Crown, in 2022 and 2023. Cineuropa credits both The Crown and Queen of Hearts in its profile of her. She is also a signatory of the Dogma 25 movement.
Queen of Hearts
Her second feature, Queen of Hearts (Dronningen), starring Trine Dyrholm, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 26 January 2019, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Audience Award. It went on to win the 2019 Nordic Council Film Prize, and Denmark submitted it for best international feature at the 92nd Academy Awards, although it was not nominated.
At home it did very well. The film won nine Robert Awards and four Bodil Awards in 2020, including best Danish film. It was this film, with Dyrholm in the lead, that carried her name beyond Scandinavia.
What the Golden Lion changes
A Golden Lion usually changes how a director’s next film is financed and distributed. For El-Toukhy, it also confirms a career built in a particular way. Her route to the Lido ran through film school, Danish television and a single feature that travelled the world, rather than through a large studio or a string of festival hits.
Her next project has not been announced in the sources available at the time of writing, and it would be unwise to guess. What is known is that Woman Unknown now carries the Golden Lion, and that Mathilde Arcel carries the Volpi Cup.
The view from the region
For audiences in the Gulf and across the Arab world, the result is a moment of recognition. The Golden Lion is the biggest festival prize of the year to have gone to a filmmaker of Arab descent, and Arab cinema was also represented on the jury this year through Kaouther Ben Hania. Together, the two facts mean that Venice 2026 had an Arab voice on both sides of the competition, among the films and among those who judged them. Arab filmmakers have a growing presence on festival lists, and this year The National was able to list five Arab directors in Venice’s official selection. El-Toukhy’s win shows that Arab heritage is part of the story of European cinema, even when the film itself is set far away from the region.
Her story also shows how a career can be built between two places: a Danish upbringing and training, and an Egyptian family link. Readers who want to see Woman Unknown will need to wait for a release in the region, for which no date appeared in the sources consulted.
Sources: AV Club, The National, Cineuropa, Wikipedia: May el-Toukhy, Wikipedia: 83rd Venice International Film Festival