Prada Foundation Film Fund Chief Paolo Moretti on First-Year Journey That Helped Spawn Rubaiyat Hossain’s Venice Horizons Entry ‘The Difficult Bride’

Last year at the Venice Film Festival, Italy’s Fondazione Prada officially launched its film fund, aimed at sustaining independent cinema from around the world without any restrictions on theme, genre or language. This year, it‘s back on the Lido with tangible proof that the initiative has borne fruit. The fund’s first edition is among backers of Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain’s “The Difficult Bride,” which is competing in the fest’s Horizons section.

Meanwhile, winners of its second round of financing will be announced in February. Variety talked to Paolo Moretti, the former Cannes Directors’ Fortnight chief, who is managing the fund in collaboration with film programmer Rebecca De Pas, about its first-year journey. We have been pleasantly surprised.

In a very short time, we’ve managed to establish a real line of communication with a large segment of the industry. We had a truly massive number of projects applying, roughly 1,200. It usually takes time for new initiatives like this to gain a foothold, but the interest in our proposed format — which is relatively unique in the world of film funding — was immediate.

We then had to deal with this huge volume of projects. From one perspective this was thrilling, as it gave us a vivid picture of the vitality of contemporary cinema and showed us just how many people still believe in it. We are interested in cinema that breaks new ground.

We subsequently adapted our structure — specifically the number of readers and collaborators — to handle this volume, because we wanted to treat every single project submitted to us with the seriousness and attention it deserved. When we announced the 14 selected projects in Berlin, there were only supposed to be 12. We managed to support two additional ones because in the end we saw that, despite the [limited] overall amount [of resources] we have available for the fund, not everyone had requested the maximum amount, so this allowed us to adjust the support in quantitative terms.

Then we started following the progress of the projects. From February onwards, we started getting updates and news, including the wonderful news of Rubaiyat Hossain’s film being selected for Venice. At the same time, we were trying to think about how to evolve the system and improve it.