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.
How has the last year unfolded for the fund?
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.
