May el-Toukhy Takes On the 'Cult of Male Genius' at Venice

Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy has arrived at the 83rd Venice Film Festival as the sole woman in the main competition — and she is using the platform to call out an industry she says is sliding backwards.

El-Toukhy's film Woman Unknown was selected for the Golden Lion competition, the festival's top tier. When the line-up was announced in July 2026, it was the only film by a woman in the running. Festival directors later added the Guardian-produced documentary NAZA, co-directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, bringing the total to two — still a stark minority in a competition of roughly twenty titles.

The numbers across Europe's other major festivals tell a similar story. At Cannes in May 2026, five of 22 competition films were directed by women. At the Berlinale in February, seven of 17 were by female filmmakers — the strongest showing of the three, though still short of parity.

El-Toukhy told The Guardian that the enduring "cult of male genius" is keeping female filmmakers down. She said she has never read an article in which a female director is promoted as a genius, and that everyone shares responsibility for changing that discourse.

She also pointed to a pattern she has lived. After graduating from film school, it took her six or seven years to get her first feature made. Her male peers, she said, moved much faster.

Woman Unknown is el-Toukhy's third feature. Her 2019 film Queen of Hearts won the Nordic Council film prize. The new film stars Mathilde Arcel and Carsten Bjørnlund (La Biennale di Venezia) and is set in the direct aftermath of Denmark's liberation from Nazi occupation. It follows Marie, a young housemaid who had an intimate relationship with a German soldier during the war.

El-Toukhy said the story grew out of research into the witch-hunt against so-called "horizontal collaborators" — women punished for relationships with occupying soldiers. "The female body during wartime is considered national territory," she said (The Guardian).

Beyond her own films, el-Toukhy is the initiator of Dogma 25, a relaunch and update of the Dogme 95 movement that famously stripped Danish cinema to its bare essentials in the mid-1990s. The new manifesto has not yet been published in full, but the connection to that tradition of rule-making places her squarely in a lineage of Danish directors who have used constraint as a creative weapon.

On the MeToo movement's impact on the film industry, el-Toukhy was blunt. Everyone became aware of the gender imbalance, she said, but "we're kind of returning to what it used to be."

She joked that she is probably "the most-known woman unknown" at Venice this year — a wry nod to the backlash that erupted over the lack of female directors on the Lido, the strip of land where the festival is held. The line carries her film's title and her own situation in one breath.

What gives the moment its edge is the gap between the conversation and the numbers. Festival directors can add films to a competition after the fact, and the discourse around inclusion has been loud and sustained for years. But the selection committees, the financing structures, and the long climb from film school to a first feature remain the machinery that actually determines who reaches a competition lineup. El-Toukhy's six or seven years waiting for a green light is not an outlier she is describing — it is the gap itself, measured in years and counted in the competition slots where women are still scarce.