May el-Toukhy‘s Woman Unknown won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion trophy purely because of gender. Jury chairperson Maggie Gyllenhaal had complained about a “systemic problem” resulting in only two female directors being in the running for the Golden Lion, and so she wanted to push back against this. The other jurors went along.
Word around the campfire inferred that Woman Unknown was a compromise choice, the jury having deadlocked over Lee Chang-dong‘s Possible Love and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor‘s NAZA, which has been way, WAY over-praised.