Woman Unknown, directed by May el-Toukhy, won the Golden Lion at the 2026 Venice Film Festival, while its lead, Mathilde Arcel, received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. John Malkovich took Best Actor for Wild Horse Nine, and Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love earned the Grand Jury Prize.
Those headline results sit within a broader collection of honors spanning emerging performers, debut filmmakers, restored cinema, and immersive storytelling. Below are the winners reported by Vogue and corroborated across festival coverage, followed by a closer examination of screenplay winner A Good Little Soldier. Its central character offers a particularly troubling question to carry away from this year’s awards: what happens when being good at your job requires becoming less attentive to other people?
The 2026 Venice Film Festival winners
Main competition
- Golden Lion: Woman Unknown, directed by May el-Toukhy.
- Grand Jury Prize: Possible Love, directed by Lee Chang-dong.
- Best Director: Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Dau.
- Special Jury Prize: NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
- Best Actress: Mathilde Arcel, Woman Unknown.
- Best Actor: John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine.
- Best Screenplay: Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo, and Olivier Gorce, Un bon petit soldat (A Good Little Soldier).
- Marcello Mastroianni Award for an emerging performer: Malou Khebizi, A Place to Heal.
For further character analysis, explore the friendship at the heart of Woman Unknown’s moral crisis and the uneasy partnership behind Malkovich’s role in Wild Horse Nine.
Orizzonti
- Best Film: Un détour par Diane, directed by Ann Sirot and Raphaël Balboni.
- Best Director: Jacqueline Lentzou, A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra.
- Special Jury Prize: La maison du vent, directed by Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu.
- Best Actress: Laleh Marzban, Moragheb.
- Best Actor: Riccardo Scamarcio, I figli della scimmia.
- Best Screenplay: Tommaso Landucci and Damiano Femfert, I figli della scimmia.
- Best Short Film: Quelques instants de bonheur, directed by Shaden Safieddine Tazi.
Spotlight, debut film, Classics, and Immersive
- Venice Spotlight audience award: I Matter, directed by Alina Șerban.
- Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a Debut Film: La maison du vent, directed by Auguste Bernard Kouemo Yanghu.
- Venice Classics Best Restored Film: La lunga notte del ’43, directed by Florestano Vancini.
- Venice Immersive Grand Prize: The Pigeon Ring, by Yuqi Zhang and Shixin Tao.
- Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize: Out of the Ashes, by Rory Mitchell and Nonny de la Peña.
- Venice Immersive Achievement Prize: Empire at Sea, by Peter Flaherty.
Ellen Burstyn and George Clooney received Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement. These career honors recognize a different kind of accomplishment from the prizes awarded to individual competition entries.
Why the screenplay winner deserves a closer look
Story spoilers follow for the premise and selected character dynamics of A Good Little Soldier; the ending is not discussed. This critical reading draws on the festival’s synopsis, Brizé’s published statement, and documented scenes and dialogue in festival reviews.
Alba Rohrwacher plays Carla, a 43-year-old executive newly appointed to a major corporation’s human resources department. Her assignment contains a contradiction: support employees’ well-being while meeting the performance demands of her boss. When she encounters toxic management, those responsibilities become difficult to reconcile.
From Carla’s perspective, professional competence promises security. She has worked hard enough to reach a position of authority, yet the festival’s character description emphasizes her underlying insecurity. That combination makes her predicament more interesting than a simple conflict between an innocent employee and a cruel company. She possesses power, but still needs reassurance from the people above her.
My reading is that this dependence gives the screenplay its sharpest dramatic possibility. Carla can recognize another person’s distress and nevertheless experience that recognition as a threat to her own standing. Understanding her vulnerability should make her decisions more legible without making their consequences disappear.
When corporate language becomes an alibi
Two brief lines reproduced in Cineuropa’s English-language review capture the workplace’s emotional rules: “Don’t let your emotions get the better of you” and “Pressure is everywhere in life.” These are reported English renderings of dialogue from the French-language film.
The first instruction sounds reasonable until emotion includes the ability to notice suffering. The second makes pressure seem like a condition of existence, placing it beyond anyone’s responsibility. Read together, the lines suggest a workplace where employees must manage their reactions while management escapes scrutiny.
Carla’s HR position places her at the point where reassuring language must meet actual complaints. Her predicament invites a useful distinction: resolving a problem for the organization can mean something very different from resolving it for the person experiencing harm. A screenplay can expose that difference through an apparently ordinary conversation, without requiring a villain to announce malicious intentions.
Carla’s son makes the conflict personal
Festival reviews describe Carla trying to maintain contact with her young son through screens while work absorbs her attention. AwardsWatch also identifies a disturbing echo between the intimidating language she experiences professionally and the way she addresses him.
This relationship changes the scale of the story. To Carla, another work obligation may feel unavoidable. To her son, its cause matters less than whether she is available to listen. The same evening can therefore contain two incompatible experiences: a parent struggling to provide and a child struggling to be heard.
The most unsettling interpretation is that work can shape intimacy even when nobody mentions the office. If Carla begins treating her son’s difficulties as failures of performance, the company’s values have entered a relationship that should permit uncertainty and dependence. Her struggle concerns more than the number of hours she spends working; it concerns the habits of judgment she brings home.
The deeper meaning of being a good soldier
Brizé’s published statement connects Carla’s submission to her fear that she does not fully deserve her position. That intention helps explain the title’s sting. Being dependable can become an endless audition for acceptance, with each compromise creating the need to prove herself again.
For me, the most productive way to approach this Venice screenplay winner is to watch how Carla defines responsibility. Does it mean satisfying authority, protecting colleagues, caring for her child, or acknowledging a limit? Those obligations cannot always be fulfilled together. Drama emerges from the choices she makes when the comforting language of professionalism stops providing an answer.
The award brings attention to a film whose character conflict rewards that kind of scrutiny. The lasting question is whether Carla can recognize a human need without immediately converting it into a demand for better performance—and whether viewers recognize that reflex in themselves.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 12, 2026 at 19:48:25 PDT (Los Angeles time)
