Venice Gave One Film Two Prizes, and the Rulebook Says It Can

May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown left the Lido on 12 September with the Golden Lion and the Coppa Volpi for Best Actress, taken by Mathilde Arcel. Maggie Gyllenhaal's jury handed the festival's top prize to a post-war thriller that had not been on anybody's frontrunner list, which is the most entertaining thing a Venice jury can do.

Two claims attached themselves to it within hours, and both are worth pulling apart.

She is the seventh woman to win it, not the first

The "first woman to take the Golden Lion" framing is already in circulation and it is not close to true. The list runs back forty-five years:

• Margarethe von Trotta, 1981, Marianne and Juliane
• Agnès Varda, 1985, Vagabond
• Mira Nair, 2001, Monsoon Wedding
• Sofia Coppola, 2010, Somewhere
• Chloé Zhao, 2020, Nomadland
• Audrey Diwan, 2021, Happening

Plus a 2022 winner, which makes el-Toukhy the seventh. The accurate and much less dramatic sentence is that she is the first woman to take it since 2022 — a four-year gap, not a barrier being broken.

The double win is written into the rules

The second thing being reported as remarkable is that one film took both the Golden Lion and an acting prize. Several write-ups have treated this as either unprecedented or as the jury quietly breaking its own constraints.

It is neither. Venice's 2026 regulations provide for it explicitly, in Article 6.1:

"Exceptionally and just in one case, after consultation with the Festival Director, the Jury may confer the Coppa Volpi or the Marcello Mastroianni award to an actor or an actress featured in a film which has won one of the other awards listed in the Regulations."

And with a specific extra condition when the film in question is the Golden Lion winner: that decision has to be unanimous across the whole jury, and the exception cannot be used more than once in a single ceremony.

Gyllenhaal confirmed at the closing press conference that this is exactly what happened — that the rules permit two awards to a Golden Lion winner if the second is unanimous, and that the jury unanimously decided to give Arcel hers.

So the interesting version is not "did they break a rule." It is that a jury used a mechanism that exists for precisely one situation a year, used it on the top prize, and had to agree without a single dissenting vote to do it.

The full competition slate

Worth having straight, because the lists circulating are incomplete and at least one reference page has been misread into double-counting an award:

• Golden Lion — Woman Unknown, May el-Toukhy
• Silver Lion, Grand Jury Prize — Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong
• Silver Lion for Best Direction — Ilya Khrzhanovsky, DAU
• Coppa Volpi, Best Actress — Mathilde Arcel, Woman Unknown
• Coppa Volpi, Best Actor — John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine, directed by Martin McDonagh
• Best Screenplay — Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo and Olivier Gorce, A Good Little Soldier
• Marcello Mastroianni Award — Malou Khebizi, A Place to Heal

The common error in the aggregated versions is a Best Director credit to Jacqueline Lentzou appearing alongside Khrzhanovsky's Silver Lion, as though one award had two winners. Lentzou's prize is real — it is the Orizzonti Best Director award, from a separate sidebar competition entirely. Two different sections, two different juries, one flattened list.

What Malkovich said, and what Gyllenhaal said

Malkovich was not there. His award came with a recorded message thanking McDonagh "for having written an incredible screenplay and for his exceptional direction," and he described himself elsewhere as humbled by it.

El-Toukhy's acceptance is being quoted in two different translations, which is worth knowing before anyone treats a particular phrasing as definitive. The wire version has her saying that for her personally, Woman Unknown is about the female body as a battleground.

Gyllenhaal, asked whether the jury had made a statement by giving the prize to a film directed by a woman, was blunt: she wanted to celebrate a beautifully made film, and said she felt it was like a laser beam. She also noted she has one vote like everyone else, and that all the decisions were complicated and involved a great deal of conversation.

She followed that with a line mocking the premise of the question — a deadpan claim that she hadn't seen the film and simply gave it the Lion because a woman made it. It is sarcasm, delivered at a press conference, and it is already being clipped and reproduced without the irony. If you see that quote presented straight anywhere this week, it has been inverted.

Which is a fitting end to a festival whose winners list is currently being reported with one award duplicated, one acting prize treated as a rule violation, and a forty-five-year history of female winners erased for a better headline.