May el-Toukhy said the advances towards gender equality in the film industry through the #MeToo movement have receded in recent years, and that “we have to be better” in the work for a more equitable industry.
el-Toukhy is the only woman who is sole director of a film in Competition at Venice Film Festival this year, with Woman Unknown (Rachel Szor is co-director of NAZA with Yuval Abraham).
“I would love to have more female colleagues in the competition beside me,” said el-Toukhy at the press conference for her film. “But it is a systemic issue. I feel like after #MeToo, all of us were really aware of this gender imbalance. Something has happened over the course of the last couple of years where we’re returning to what it used to be; so we have to be better. We have to ask the critical questions.”
Woman Unknown follows a young housemaid who is about to marry her employer, a wealthy older widower; when news of her past relationship with a German soldier during the Second World War catches up to her.
The director said the film “is about the invisibility of women. It’s about being objectified on one hand, and on the other hand, being unseen and voiceless.”
el-Toukhy gave a measured and good-natured response in answer to a question about being the only woman to have directed a film solo in this year’s Competition. “I’m really good at sleeping,” began the director. “But I woke up in the middle of the night, and thought ‘I’m probably the most known Woman Unknown in Venice Film Festival.”
“I’m personally excited to be part of the festival. In terms of me being one of two women in Competition, I believe it’s a structural problem that I have encountered throughout my own career,” said el-Toukhy, noting it took her six years to get her first film financed after film school, whereas it was much quicker for male peers.
The budgets available to female filmmakers affects the actors they can attract to a project, which in turn affects the willingness of festivals to programme the films, said the director. “That’s an access point to a festival.”
el-Toukhy also critiqued “the narrative surrounding male directors, the narrative we create around the male genius. I’ve never read an article where a female director is promoted as a genius.
“All of us are responsible for changing that discourse,” said el-Toukhy. “I would love if everyone one of my male peers in Competition – or every male delegate, or every delegate here – would be asked that same question. We’re all part of the problem and we will be part of the solution.”
Battleground
The director identified “a fundamental theme and the heart of the film” as “the female body as a battleground.”
“We see women be punished in the streets for having been intimate with German soldiers. These women would be cut, pissed on and spat on, their clothes would be ripped off, they would be assaulted in many different ways.
“But that theatre is born somewhere,” said el-Toukhy. ”It’s a symptom of a systemic issue, which is the female body in a private setting. I realised that the female body in wartime is perceived as part of the national territory. Therefore, it was deemed appropriate that we punish the women for the men they had slept with. But what does that mean in a private setting? That prompted me and Maren [Louise Kaehne, co-writer] to investigate that.”
Mathilde Arcel leads the cast, alongside Carsten Bjornlund and Thorbjorn Hedegaard. “What made this process special was I was in from an early stage, and had a lot of time to research the subject and stories of these women,” said Arcel. “We had time to rehearse every scene, which was amazing because you almost never have time. It was almost a theatrical process, which contributed in a good sense to the movie, because when you know the basic material so well, you can open up for more improvisation.”
Woman Unknown has its world premiere this evening (September 6) in Venice, with the festival running until Saturday, September 12.
TrustNordisk handles world sales on the film, which is produced by Mikael Rieks for Nordisk Film Production.
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