This is where we want to begin. Because the Venice 83 palmarès seems to us to tell us something that goes beyond the simple succession of awards: the jury presided over by Maggie Gyllenhaal chose to reward the other half of the gaze. Not only the female gaze, but everything that eludes the dominant perspective, everything that cinema too often observes from a single point of view: the body, power, identity, violence, freedom, subordination, solitude, the very possibility of choosing.
The strongest signal is, naturally, the Golden Lion awarded to Woman Unknown by May el-Toukhy, the only film in competition directed by a woman, together with the Volpi Cup awarded to its leading actress, Mathilde Arcel. Two awards which, placed side by side, acquire an even more precise meaning: the highest recognition for the film and the one for its performer converge on the same gaze and the same body.
And Woman Unknown already contains everything in its title. Not simply an unknown woman, but the unknown woman. Woman as a gender, as a historical, cultural and social subject whom a culture has believed for centuries it knew, while continuing above all to define her from the outside. A woman observed, narrated, desired, judged, represented. And yet, in some sense, still unknown. The Golden Lion thus also becomes a recognition of the need for another place from which to look.
But the other half of the gaze does not coincide with the feminine. And this is precisely what makes the jury’s palmarès particularly interesting.
But the other half of the gaze does not coincide with the feminine. And this is precisely what makes the jury’s palmarès particularly interesting.
There is NAZA, awarded the Special Jury Prize, which takes the gaze into the Israeli-Palestinian situation, that obscene space in which a human being can become a number, a house a target, a family a statistical variable and a bombing a correctly executed procedure. It is the gaze that refuses the language through which power makes suffering abstract and gives statistics back their human body.
There is Un bon petit soldat, awarded for its screenplay, which stages the contradiction of a woman attempting to be, simultaneously, a professional subject, a mother, a wife and an individual, discovering how much female autonomy continues to collide with working, family and emotional structures built according to an order that has not yet ceased to be male.
There is Possible Love, winner of the Grand Jury Prize, about class struggle, mass layoffs and repression, with its particular gaze on relationships, desire, and the forms of solitude and inequality that settle inside intimacy.
There is DAU, winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director, where power is not merely a theme but a structure that penetrates bodies, behaviours, relationships and the very possibility of being individuals.
And there is Wild Horse Nine, with the Volpi Cup awarded to John Malkovich. An award that belongs perfectly to this broader idea of the other half of the gaze. Because Martin McDonagh’s film looks where we normally prefer not to look: at the power that decides history while we continue to believe we participate in it, at democracy as representation, at freedom as the possibility of choosing only among options already laid out by someone else. John Malkovich plays a man who belongs to that machine and who, precisely for this reason, reveals its absurdity. The other half of the gaze is also the gaze upon power from the perspective of someone observing its mechanisms from within.
A Place to Heal, with the Marcello Mastroianni Award going to Malou Khebizi, also belongs to this geography, not because it recognises a young presence capable of bringing another form of subjectivity, fragility and resistance to the screen.
This, then, is what we believe the jury presided over by Maggie Gyllenhaal has done: it has not constructed a “female” palmarès, but has expanded the field of the visible. It has rewarded different gazes, different bodies, different experiences, different forms of conflict with what is normally considered the centre.
This is why our thanks to Maggie Gyllenhaal and to the entire jury are sincere. Not simply for having rewarded a woman director, but for recognising that cinema needs to step outside its perceptual habits. That quality cannot be separated from the position from which one looks. And that perhaps, in order to see something new, we must first realise how long we have been looking in the same way.
There remains, naturally, one regret: Kami nour (A Bit of Light) by Ali Asgari received no recognition. And that is a pity, because the film introduces another radical form of otherness: that of the man whose work, social function, professional identity and, ultimately, very perception of his own necessity in the world have been taken away by power. A film about suicide that becomes a film about life; about the possibility of continuing to exist when what defined us has been confiscated. A film in which war remains in the background while power acts above all through what it takes away from the individual.
And there remains the Italian regret for Serpenti by Roberto De Paolis Maino. A film that begins with a femicide but does not limit itself to the question of gender violence: it shifts the gaze from murder to its social management, from guilt to responsibility, from the crime to the institutional machine that should recognise it and instead ends up distorting it. The body of the murdered woman thus becomes the blind spot around which a society incapable of assigning things their proper weight revolves. A film about femicide, certainly, but above all a film about power, bureaucracy, the removal of responsibility, and the ability of institutions to transform reality.
The fact that Serpenti was placed in Spotlight, outside the official competition, and remained without awards therefore leaves an open question. Not necessarily about the quality of the palmarès, but about the difficulty that still exists in recognising, within Italian cinema, works that choose to look at power without making it reassuring.
And yet the most important fact remains.
Venice 83 awarded Woman Unknown the Golden Lion and its protagonist the Volpi Cup. It awarded NAZA, Un bon petit soldat, Possible Love, DAU, Wild Horse Nine, A Place to Heal. Very different films, but united by their ability to shift the point of observation.
There is also a thank-you that goes to the Horizons jury for awarding Un retour par Diane: a film that places at its centre a visionary, unconventional protagonist, irreducible to the categories through which we normally attempt to order the feminine. Diane is not a woman to be explained or brought back to a model: she is a presence that escapes, that exceeds, that looks at the world from a marginal position and precisely for this reason makes it visible again. This award, too, therefore seems to us to belong to the same geography.
The other half of the gaze is not necessarily that of women. It is the gaze that looks at what the centre does not see, at what power conceals, at what dominant culture has already classified, normalised or rendered invisible.
For this, thank you, Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Thank you to your jury.
For reminding us that the world has not yet been entirely seen.
And that the task of cinema, perhaps, is precisely this: to keep searching for what we have not yet learned to see.