Naza<\/a> alongside Yuval Abraham. <\/p>\n\u201cI would have loved to have more female colleagues in competition,\u201d she sighs. \u201cI hope, for the sake of our daughters and the generations to come, that we\u2019ll be able to turn this discourse around. But I think it takes all of us to do that and therefore I would have loved if this question was also asked to my male colleagues in competition and all the delegates here, because it\u2019s really an issue that we all have to debate and chip in on in order to solve it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The treatment of women also drives Woman Unknown, set in Denmark shortly after the Second World War. Arcel plays Marie, a nanny preparing to marry her employer, a wealthy factory owner who knows nothing of the wartime relationship with a German soldier she is trying to keep secret.<\/p>\n
El-Toukhy and her co-writer Maren Louise Kaehne began with photographs from 1943 that had been republished in a Danish newspaper. The images showed a woman being publicly humiliated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey showed this woman who had her clothes ripped off,\u201d she explains. \u201cShe was sitting and lying on a bench, she was clearly in agony and there was a swastika painted on her back. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese photos were actually propaganda photos, if you have an intimate relationship with a German soldier, this could happen to you, and so we started talking about the female body as part of a national property, almost national territory, in times of war and how that is a very universal theme.\u201d<\/p>\n
El-Toukhy wanted to examine the reprisals that followed the end of the occupation, including the targeting of women who had relationships with German soldiers. Her interest lay in the difficult questions surrounding guilt and punishment.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany European nations reacted against people who had had intimate relationships or had collaborated with the Germans, and understandably so,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd so for us there was a real potential to dive into all the perspectives of that. I always gravitate towards telling stories where it\u2019s not easy for an audience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the film\u2019s most striking moments come as Marie witnesses other women being humiliated and abused, much like the woman in the photographs. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe film is about the female body as a battleground,\u201d El-Toukhy says, describing \u201cthese women who got dragged into the street and cut and assaulted \u2026 and spat on and stigmatised for life\u201d.<\/p>\n
The film also examines Denmark\u2019s reckoning with its own conduct during the occupation. For El-Toukhy, the punishment of individuals raises questions about the compromises made by the country\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cDenmark’s government chose to collaborate with the Germans to avoid too many casualties because we\u2019re such a small nation,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey occupied us, but at the same time we were co-operating with them to some extent and so then afterwards, in a way, we had to rewrite the narrative, I think, in order to live with ourselves and the fact that we chose that path instead of putting up resistance from the get-go.\u201d<\/p>\n
El-Toukhy\u2019s interest in people judged and excluded by those around them extends to her own childhood. <\/p>\n
Raised in Denmark by a Danish mother, a social worker, and an Egyptian father, a computer scientist, she grew up conscious of how others saw her family.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that stems from growing up in a predominantly white setting as a brown person, looking through my father\u2019s eyes, who is a first-generation immigrant, sensing his stress. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe felt that he was defined by the surroundings and didn\u2019t have a voice himself and he unwillingly passed that gene on to his children. Somehow in my stories that\u2019s always present.\u201d<\/p>\n
She studied at the Danish National School of Performing Arts and the National Film School of Denmark, and has predominantly lived and worked in Europe. Asked whether she feels connected to her Egyptian heritage and has stories from that part of her life she wants to tell, she is emphatic.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do feel connected. When I was younger, I would say I\u2019m half Egyptian, half Danish. Now I feel like I\u2019m double! I\u2019m a double person. I carry both. I do have stories and I especially have stories about growing up outside of Egypt with an Egyptian Muslim background. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was born in 1977, so in the \u201980s and \u201990s there was a real right-wing wave that flushed over Europe. What did that mean for my family? I\u2019m interested in investigating that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before winning the Golden Lion for Woman Unknown, May el-Toukhy was already finding some humour in her film\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[91691,5543,878,101089,42,43,2865,789,40,38,41,39,2623],"class_list":["post-614670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-arts-culture-team","tag-egypt","tag-film","tag-film-festivals","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-standard","tag-story","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-venice-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}