“Stop the film!”
Around half an hour before the end of Woman Unknown, during the official screening at the Venice Film Festival, screams began to be heard from the Gallery of the Sala Grande. In the audience, at first it was difficult to understand what was happening: the film continued and those following it with the Italian subtitles did not seem to have particular problems.
A request to halt the screening came, however, from the director herself, May el-Toukhy.
The problem with the English subtitles
The issue concerned the English subtitles, which had fallen out of sync with the images and dialogue of the film.
For Italian audiences the problem could easily go unnoticed, since Italian subtitles were also present in the room. The situation was different for international viewers and especially for the jurors who needed the English subtitles to follow the film correctly.
When May el-Toukhy realized what was happening, she got up from the gallery and began asking that the screening be stopped.
For a moment in the Sala Grande a rather surreal situation unfolded: the film continued on the screen while from the gallery its own director tried to interrupt it.
The screening is rolled back by 15 minutes
Once the problem had been identified, the screening was actually halted.
To allow those who had followed the film with the English subtitles to properly recover the portion affected by the technical issue, Woman Unknown was restarted about 15 minutes earlier.
The audience then found themselves re-watching a quarter of an hour of the film. An interruption that also had a fairly obvious side effect: several spectators took advantage of the pause to stand up and leave the Sala Grande before the conclusion.
At that moment, of course, no one could yet know how important that screening would become.
A few days later Woman Unknown won two of the festival’s most important prizes
Six days later, at the Venice Film Festival awards ceremony, Woman Unknown emerged as the edition’s big winner.
The film by May el-Toukhy claimed the Golden Lion for Best Film, while Mathilde Arcel, who plays the protagonist Marie, received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress.
A double recognition that makes the backstage of its first Venetian appearance all the more intriguing.
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