The idea for “The Difficult Bride” traces back to a story Rubaiyat Hossain heard as a 7 year old, visiting a Dhaka beauty parlor with her mother.
“There was a bride who died there,” Hossain says. “Everyone knew this story from our generation, and I remember being seven, and even at that time, I had visualized this story. It was in sepia for some reason, I don’t know, but I completely had the visuals in my head, and it’s something that always stayed with me.”
Variety is unveiling an exclusive clip from the supernatural feminist drama, which will become the first Bangladeshi feature to screen at the Venice Film Festival when it bows in the Horizons competition.
That salon, Mayfair, became the setting for a film that follows Zaineen (Zaineen Chowdhury Karim), a bride-to-be whose wedding preparations spiral into a battle with her own body. Hossain first tried the material as a short in 2006. Two decades and many drafts later, the project pulled in her academic background in gender studies alongside something more personal. “My own self and my own body became a part of the film,” she says. “My embodied experience of being a female in my own body and how I feel is something I tried to communicate in the film. And that is why it became supernatural, because a lot of the things are not logical. That is where the grotesque comes in, that is where the lizards and the snakes come in.”
