“Woman Unknown”, interview with director May El-Toukhy and actress Mathilde Arcel

In competition at the Venice Film Festival 2026, Woman Unknown follows Marie, a young nanny about to marry the wealthy widower she works for, whose wartime affair with a German soldier threatens to unravel the new life she has built for herself amid post-war anarchy.

Director May El-Toukhy, the only woman directing a competition title this year, and lead actress Mathilde Arcel discuss the history of the so-called horizontal collaborators behind the film, the physical work of playing a woman holding her fear in, and the decision to keep the story’s violence subtle rather than explicit.

The horizontal collaborators

El-Toukhy traces the film back to a specific historical interest: “What came first was the interest in the so-called horizontal collaborators. That was the starting point, and then me and my co-writer Maren Louise Käehne worked backwards from that point”. That research led her to the liberation weeks that followed the German occupation, a moment of celebration shadowed by violence against these women: “We became interested in the post-war time, the liberation weeks, where there was euphoria and joy because the occupation had ended, but at the same time these women were incredibly afraid to be hunted down.

Many of them were hunted down, humiliated in the street, assaulted, spat on, pissed on, and cut”. Trying to understand how that violence became possible pushed her toward a wider, and still current, idea: “The female body is seen as part of the national territory, and almost something that’s owned by the nation because of reproduction. That’s something universal — it’s still very true today in every war zone where women’s bodies are violated during or after a war. But I became interested in what that looks like within the parameter of a private setting”.

Becoming Marie

For Arcel, building Marie started with research into real accounts of women who lived through the same experience: “It became very important, first of all, to research a lot and to read as many excerpts of diaries from these women that I could find, or anonymous interviews, so I could get to understand these women as well as possible”. Just as important, she says, was imagining who Marie was before the war reduced her to a single secret: “It was also really important for me to try to invent for myself what kind of life Marie had before the war. What kind of woman was she? Because she wasn’t only shaped by this single event, this intimate relation with a German soldier.

The world would probably shape her in that image if they knew that about her, but for her, she had a lot of dreams and hopes for the future before all of this happened”. That interior life translated into a very physical approach on set: “The emotion very present in the movie is a lot of fear, and fear is a very physical emotion. I worked a lot with breath,  for instance, holding my breath in a whole scene, because Marie is holding all of these emotions in and trying not to show anything, because she’ll lose everything if her secret gets out”.

A violence with no explicit violence

Asked about a film that conveys violence against the female body without ever showing it explicitly, El-Toukhy describes the research behind those scenes: “There’s a lot in the scenes we did on the female body and violation of the female body, or what we put our bodies through, without spoiling the film. We were really thorough with these scenes. I read a lot of scientific material about how you would investigate the female body at that time, and what remedies you could use to relieve pain, and how little care there was for women in pain”. A neglect, she notes, that has not entirely disappeared.

Staying true to the tragedy

Asked about a line late in the film, in which Marie’s future husband dismisses one of her wishes by saying it only happens in fairy tales, El-Toukhy ties it back to the real testimonies she read: “When you read the accounts and testimonies of these women, many of them had really difficult lives after the war, after the stigma they experienced in post-war, the assaults, it was something that never left them. So it felt right to stay true to the tragedy of it all”.

Plot