- Born
- May el-Toukhy was born on August 17, 1977 in Charlottenlund, Denmark. She is a director and writer, known for The Crown (2016), Queen of Hearts (2019) and Long Story Short (2015).
- For me, Queen of Hearts (2019) is a sort of cautionary tale. But I have met many audience members who experience the film in other ways than I do. And I love that.
- With Woman, Unknown I want to explore the idea of the female body as a public domain, a public matter for society to pass judgment on regardless of time and place. I am preoccupied with what it does to a person to carry the burden of a concealed secret for too long, the stigma, the shame - internalized and collective.
- Mostly, I get inspired by stories or characters that face a big dilemma. I am very curious of nature and interested in almost everything and everybody. I read a lot and listen a lot. The reason why I love the medium of film so much is because it combines so many interests of mine. Psychology, visual art, fashion, music - the list is long. Filmmaking is a collaborative art form. We need each other in order to make a film and the beauty of that keeps me going.
- It has been my ambition from the very beginning not to judge the characters but make space for interpretation so that the audience can draw their own conclusions.
- As a female filmmaker representation is a discussion I have all the time with my female and male colleagues. As a woman coming from a minority background (my father is Egyptian), I have always longed to be represented in fiction. As I child, I felt invisible because there was almost no nonwhite representation in fiction in Scandinavia. And as a young woman I felt invisible because the fictional representation of womanhood was limited to the elaboration of the good wife, the caring mother and/or the woman torn between work-life and domestic life. I have longed to see complex and nuanced female characters on screen. I think on screen equality is not going to happen if we just reproduce the same old good-natured female characters. We have to dare to expose both women that do good and women that do bad in order to be relevant for a contemporary audience.
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