After announcing its inaugural open call in September 2025, the Fondazione Prada Film Fund arrives at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival with one of the first projects to emerge from the initiative. Among more than 1,200 submissions from filmmakers around the world, 14 projects were selected for support across development, production, and post-production.
The first of those films to reach a major international festival is Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain’s The Difficult Bride, which had its world premiere in Venice’s Orizzonti section on September 6 at Sala Darsena on the Lido.
Making “The Difficult Bride”
Rubaiyat Hossain, “The Difficult Bride,” 2026. Produced by François D’Artemare / Les Films de l’Après–Midi (FR), Midas Filmes (PT), Khona Talkies (BD), and Barentsfilm (NO), with Tandem Films (DE). Distributed by Films Boutique.
For Hossain, The Difficult Bride continues a body of work that has consistently examined the lives of women navigating social structures, tradition, labor, and questions of independence in Bangladesh. A filmmaker, screenwriter, and researcher, Hossain studied Women’s Studies at Smith College, South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Her previous films include Meherjaan (2011), Under Construction (2015), and Made in Bangladesh (2019).
Set in contemporary Dhaka, The Difficult Bride unfolds around Zaineen, a bride-to-be preparing for her wedding day. What begins with the familiar rituals surrounding marriage gradually becomes something more psychologically charged. As Zaineen undergoes beauty treatments and preparations intended to ready her for the ceremony, the rituals begin to expose the expectations imposed on her body and her future.
The wedding day becomes a threshold between conformity and self-possession. Beauty rituals, social pressures, and a supernatural force converge, transforming what should be a carefully choreographed celebration into a journey toward bodily autonomy and freedom. Through Zaineen’s experience, Hossain turns the highly visible spectacle of a wedding inward, using the bride’s body as a space where questions of gender, desire, tradition, and control collide.
Rubaiyat Hossain, “The Difficult Bride,” 2026. Produced by François D’Artemare / Les Films de l’Après–Midi (FR), Midas Filmes (PT), Khona Talkies (BD), and Barentsfilm (NO), with Tandem Films (DE). Distributed by Films Boutique.
The film itself reflects an equally international network of filmmaking. A co-production between France, Bangladesh, Portugal, Norway, and Germany, it was produced by Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Midas Filmes, Khona Talkies, and Barentsfilm, with Tandem Productions. Films Boutique oversees international sales. Its Venice premiere also marks an early milestone for Fondazione Prada’s relatively new experiment in supporting independent cinema.
“The selection at the Venice Film Festival of one of the projects supported in the first edition of the Film Fund represents an important early achievement for an initiative we believe in deeply,” said Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada. She describes the fund as an effort to support projects distinguished by “originality, seriousness, and spirit of experimentation,” while continuing the foundation’s investment in cinema as a way of interpreting the complexities of contemporary life.
Supporting New Cinema
Rubaiyat Hossain, “The Difficult Bride,” 2026. Produced by François D’Artemare / Les Films de l’Après–Midi (FR), Midas Filmes (PT), Khona Talkies (BD), and Barentsfilm (NO), with Tandem Films (DE). Distributed by Films Boutique.
Launched under the direction of Paolo Moretti, the Fondazione Prada Film Fund was conceived to support feature-length projects without restrictions on genre or geography. Rather than prescribing a particular kind of cinema, it prioritizes distinct personal and cinematic visions across languages, forms, and perspectives.
Its first edition committed €1.5 million across the selected projects, with individual productions eligible to receive up to €250,000. The initiative builds on Fondazione Prada’s longstanding engagement with cinema while extending that involvement directly into the process of making films.
For Moretti, seeing The Difficult Bride arrive in Venice only months after the fund announced its first selection signals what that support can make possible. The remaining projects will continue to develop over the coming months and years, while the Fondazione Prada Film Fund is expected to announce its next group of selected projects in February 2027.
For now, however, its first chapter belongs to Hossain—and to a bride in Dhaka whose wedding day becomes the setting for a much larger reckoning with what it means to belong to oneself.
