The 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival opened with some juicy statements in which American director Maggie Gyllenhaal – in charge of presiding over the Official Section jury – expressed her discomfort at the scarce presence of films directed by women in the competition for the Golden Lion. "We have finally discovered that women simply make worse films than men," quipped the director of The Bride! and The Lost Daughter with irony at the opening press conference. And it must be said that, before the start of the Festival, the outlook was bleak. Out of the twenty-two films in the Official Competition, only two had a woman at the helm, and Kvinde ukendt (Woman unknown), by Danish filmmaker May el-Toukhy, was the only one directed solely by a woman – the other case was the documentary Naza, co-directed by Israeli Rachel Szor alongside Yuval Abraham–. Well, what began as a fair complaint has ended in a full-blown vindication, since the jury presided over by Gyllenhaal decided to award the Golden Lion to Kvinde ukendt, a film that portrays the harsh vital odyssey of a woman trying to rebuild her life in Denmark after the Second World War, when the Nordic nation was trying to cleanse its image by brutally persecuting those who had collaborated with the Nazi regime.