Danish writer/director May el-Toukhy is not obsessed with World War 2, nor Denmark’s specific history of occupation (and resistance). “I’m interested in aftermath,” she explains in the new episode of the Nordic Film Talks podcast series. “And I’m preoccupied with women’s stories. I probably have always been more interested in women. I was born that way.”

Her new film, Woman Unknown (Kvinde ukendt), which she co-wrote with Maren Louise Käehne, follows a young woman, Marie (played by Mathilde Arcel), living in Copenhagen just after WW2 ends. Marie is a nanny and maid who will soon marry a wealthy widower, unless he discovers the secret she is hiding: that she fraternised with a German soldier during the war.

“What's really at the heart of this story is the female body as a battlefield,” el-Toukhy says. “There is also a sense of women’s invisibility throughout history.”

The story, which is set over just five days and doesn’t explain too much of Marie’s backstory, is inspired by the real stories of women who were publicly shamed and violently attacked after they were outed for intimate relations with German soldiers.

The director explains, “It took quite a lot of research and digging to get to know the destiny of these women. They were anonymous. To this day, the women who are still alive, almost no one wants to come forward, because it's still so infused with shame, both external and internal.”

Woman Unknown, which has its world premiere in Venice Competition on Sept 6, is her third feature film, after the romantic comedy Long Story Short (Lang historie kort, 2015) and the incest drama Queen of Hearts (Dronningen, 2019), as well as directing on major TV shows such as Netflix’s The Crown and DR’s Cry Wolf (Ulven kommer).

TrustNordisk handles sales on Woman Unknown, and has already closed a number of key territory deals. Backers of Woman Unknown include the Danish Film Institute, Eurimages, Investment and Development Agency of Latvia, Riga City Council, Nordisk Film & TV Fond (NFTVF), DR, the Swedish Film Institute, SVT, LIAA, and Riga Film Fund. Mikael Rieks, whose credits include the Oscar-nominated Land of Mine (Under sandet), produces for Nordisk Film Production.

El-Toukhy wanted to tell this complex story without judgment, much like she did in her previous feature Queen of Hearts, which also showed troubling situations. “I didn't want to create a moral story where I tell the audience what to think about this, that or the other. My idea has been to eliminate some of these structures in order for an audience to reflect on the position of women in the past and in the present and possibly in the future.”

She says that when she first pitched the film, people would glaze over, because they thought it was just another WW2-era story. “There’s just been so much of that, which is relevant to talk about, but it’s also unfair, because women have not had the chance to tell our stories, as in women directors, but also films about women in that era. So that energised my process writing this film.”

She leaned into the thrilling elements of the story - setting it over just five days helps with “a sense of urgency, and chaos, and euphoria and the danger of that time… We worked a lot with surprise, mystery, suspense.”

In the podcast interview, el-Toukhy also talks about why she wanted to avoid the period film cliches of the 1940s; why being selected for Venice Competition is an “ego boost”; and why explaining situations to her younger brother in childhood set her up to tell stories for a living.