Woman Unknown Took the Golden Lion. NAZA Took the Room

Saturday night, the envelope finally existed.

Screen Daily filed from the 12 September ceremony. Greta Scarano and Nicolas Maupas hosted. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s jury handed out eight prizes. Radhika Seth’s list in Vogue matches the board. The Golden Lion went to Woman Unknown, directed by May el-Toukhy. Mathilde Arcel, the lead, also took the Volpi Cup for actress.

We already published a viewing list while the jury still had the envelope and mid-fest math on the Lion. This is the result, not another preview.

What Woman Unknown is, as far as the dispatches go

Deadline’s copy is the one with the plot in a clause. Arcel plays a nanny and housemaid hiding a dangerous secret in post-World War Two Denmark. El-Toukhy was the only solo woman directing in the 21-film competition. That is a programming fact, not a reason the film won. Juries do not owe you a demographic story. They also do not owe you the movie that got the longest clap.

Last year Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab looked like a lock and lost to Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother. Ben Hania is on this year’s jury. I am not going to invent a closed-room theory about that. I will note that Gyllenhaal’s table did not give the Lion to the documentary that stopped the festival for 25 minutes.

They gave it to a psychological thriller, and they gave the documentary a special prize. That is a split, not a snub you can prove.

NAZA still owns the week

NPR, using AP, logged the ovation before the prizes. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors of last year’s Oscar-winning No Other Land, brought NAZA. Israeli military insiders describe what they call the systemic killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Twenty-five minutes standing. Longest on record in this building, a minute past Hind Rajab.

The jury gave NAZA the Special Jury Prize. That is not nothing. It is also not the Lion. If you only watch one Venice title because you think this is where the news gets into the cinema, it is still this one. The prize list did not change that.

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love took the Grand Jury Prize. We flagged him on the viewing list. If you wanted a “serious cinema” winner that is not a documentary, this is the one the jury put in second.

Director, actor, screenplay, the rest of the board

Silver Lion for best director: Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Dau. Screen Daily spells him Khrzanovsky in one pass. Vogue uses Khrzhanovsky. I am not going to pretend I have the passport. The film is Dau.

Volpi Cup for actor: John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine. Martin McDonagh’s CIA two-hander with Sam Rockwell, Easter Island, 1973, the coup coming. Malkovich was on a set and sent a video. Screen Daily has him thanking McDonagh for “gifting him a fantastic role.” Deadline says the win will feed Oscar chatter. Malkovich has never won one. That sentence has been in every dispatch this week. It will be in the next ones too.

Best screenplay: Un bon petit soldat / A Good Little Soldier, Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo, Olivier Gorce. Marcello Mastroianni Award: Malou Khebizi, A Place to Heal. Lion of the Future, Luigi De Laurentiis debut: House of the Wind, Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu. Audience award, per Screen Daily: I Matter, Alina Şerban. Horizons best film: Diane In The Loop, Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni.

Lifetime Golden Lions went to Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney earlier in the festival. The closing film was Giovanni Veronesi’s Dio Ride, out of competition. None of that should rearrange your watchlist.

What the English-language pattern did not do this time

Seth notes that English-speaking jury presidents this century have often landed on English-language winners: Vera Drake, Somewhere, The Shape of Water, Nomadland, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poor Things. She also lists the exceptions: Aronofsky with Faust, Mann with Pietà, Mendes with a Filipino drama.

Gyllenhaal is an English-speaking president. Woman Unknown is a Danish-set film from el-Toukhy. I am not going to stretch that into a theory of taste. The pattern was a warning against assuming the Lion would go to McDonagh because Hollywood was in the building. McDonagh left with an acting prize and a lot of ink. He did not leave with the statue.

We already reviewed Florian Zeller’s Bunker. It is not on this board. That happens.

What to actually hunt

If you stream one Lion winner this winter, start with Woman Unknown when a company buys it. Arcel now has a Volpi and a film that beat the room’s documentary. That combination travels.

If you stream one film because the festival mattered as news, NAZA. Special Jury Prize. Record ovation. Jonathan Glazer as an EP, from earlier coverage. It will be argued about in comments you should skip.

If you want the filmmaker Venice usually rewards in the long run, Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love. Grand Jury is how a lot of his audience finds him.

Wild Horse Nine will get a trailer either way. Watch it if you liked The Banshees of Inisherin. Do not watch it as a geography lesson about Rapa Nui. Malkovich on a laptop from set is not a reason to buy a ticket. The McDonagh script might be.

I am not ranking Dau from a prize. Director prizes are sometimes the jury’s way of saying the film is a lot. Sometimes they mean it is good. You will find out when someone puts it in front of you.

How this rewrites the viewing list

The mid-fest copy treated Wild Horse Nine as the Hollywood object with a brain and NAZA as the film the room would not stop clapping for. The jury kept the second half of that sentence and moved the statue.

El-Toukhy was not the betting favorite in the English-language recaps I could read without a login. That is not a scandal. Venice likes to look unpredictable, then spends six months being very predictable in the distributors’ calendars. A Danish-set thriller with a Volpi-winning lead is an easier sell than a Gaza documentary, even when the documentary is the one people will remember in a decade. I would rather be honest about that than pretend the Lion is a moral instrument.

If you used our eight-title list as a queue, reorder it. Woman Unknown goes first because it won. Possible Love stays high because Lee plus Grand Jury is how a film finds a U.S. window. NAZA stays high because the ovation was the news, and a special prize does not unsay 25 minutes. Wild Horse Nine drops a notch: actor prize, video speech, still a McDonagh title, no Lion. Dau is now a director-prize problem. Watch it if you already wanted Khrzhanovsky. Do not watch it because a Silver Lion sounds like homework you failed.

Burstyn and Clooney’s lifetime awards are ceremony furniture. House of the Wind is a debut prize, which means you will be told it is a discovery in March. Maybe. Debut Lions are a mixed bag and always were.

The festival closed with Dio Ride. Skip it unless you collect Italian gala films. You do not.

The 83rd is over. The Oscar industrial complex will now pretend Venice was a primary. A few of these titles will earn that. Most will become a footnote under a later Telluride sentence. Keep the three that have a shape: el-Toukhy’s thriller, Abraham and Szor’s document, Lee’s prize. Everything else is a name for a later list.