Danish filmmaker May el-Toukhy, one of the two female directors competing for the Golden Lion this year, arrives in Venice with a sharp, searing analysis of the women thrown to the wolves in the aftermath of World War II.
Women Unknown — Scandinavian in both its aesthetic and precision — was always going to be about class, complicity and survival. For a brief period, it was even going to focus on the Reformation witch hunts, before el-Toukhy found herself a little bored by the perpetrators. “The reasons they were hunting these women were just not that interesting,” she laughs to The Hollywood Reporter.
Inspired by a newspaper picture dated from the 1940s of a woman sitting with a swastika painted on her back, el-Toukhy and co-writer Maren Louise Käehne soon turned their attention to the women whose bodies became a battlefield during the Second World War; those who found themselves with no choice but to fall into the arms of soldiers from occupying armies, and suffered severe consequences — hunted down, publicly shamed and punished for the rest of their lives.
Woman Unknown is backdropped by a Danish city free from Nazi occupation, mere months after World War II has ended. It tells the story of Marie (Mathilde Arcel), a young nanny and housemaid about to marry her wealthy, older, and widowed employer, Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund). But Marie guards a shameful secret. During the war, she was in an intimate relationship with a German soldier. Now Marie’s past threatens to catch up with her, and she is forced to do everything in her power to preserve her new status as lady of the house in post-war anarchy.
