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.”
Hossain is careful not to place the blame for that pressure solely on men. Azmeri Haque Badhon plays the salon owner who enforces the beauty standard on Zaineen, including a scene of facial injections that Hossain says mirrors treatment common in Bangladeshi salons. “It’s also about how women can be some of the biggest upholders and sustainers of patriarchy and the patriarchal system,” she says. “It’s not only men; women also participate in this. It’s a system of power. It takes both to participate in it.”
The film’s Dhaka backdrop carries traces of the country’s July 2024 unrest, including scenes of women being surveilled and policed for their clothing and behavior, work that reaches the screen through Rikita Nondine Shimu’s character, Minoti. Hossain resists reading the film as a direct response to that period, though. “I wouldn’t say the film is set around the time of July,” she says. “I tried to create like a reality of Dhaka where there is political violence outside, there is a lot of violence against women. Women’s rights have always been an issue in Bangladesh.”
She places “The Difficult Bride” alongside her earlier features as a kind of class trilogy of Bangladeshi womanhood. “‘Under Construction’ talked about a middle-class woman, ‘Made in Bangladesh’ talked about a working-class woman, and I think ‘The Difficult Bride’ talks about the kind of the ultra-wealthy population of the tri-state,” she says, referring to Dhaka’s Gulshan-Baridhara area. “Even in this gilded cage, even with all these privileges, you can’t be free.”
Karim, making her acting debut in the lead role, was originally Hossain’s assistant director. When the shoot’s original cast changed following the disruption from July, Karim stepped in to read opposite another actor during Zoom rehearsals. “She is so beautiful and I feel like she is the character herself,” Hossain says of watching her on screen. “I might have auditioned her like around 15, 20 times.” The cast also includes Sunerah Kamal in addition to Badhon and Shimu, all three of whom are Bangladesh National Film Award winners.
Hossain, who teaches part-time at Smith College, including a course on love and devotion in Bollywood cinema, argues that the pressures her film dramatizes extend well beyond South Asia. “I see that a woman who is coming from Mexico or Guatemala or Bangladesh or Vermont have same issues when it comes to this specific idea of beauty and submitting,” she says.
Offscreen, Hossain has launched a grant and mentorship program for Bangladeshi women filmmakers, aiming to address what she describes as compounding structural barriers: limited access to money, restrictions on women’s mobility, the absence of a formal film school and an industry culture built on informal, male peer networks. “There is also like an overall assumption and lack of role models,” she says.
“The Difficult Bride” is an international co-production between France’s Les Films de l’Après-Midi, Bangladesh’s Khona Talkies, Portugal’s Midas Filmes, Norway’s Barentsfilm and Germany’s Tandem Production, and was supported by the first edition of the Fondazione Prada Film Fund. Films Boutique is handling world sales. Following Venice, the film moves on to the Toronto and BFI London film festivals.
For Hossain, the film marked a creative turning point. “I’m not tied to social realism anymore,” she says. “I really relied on my body and my instincts to make creative decisions, and I really enjoyed the process.”
She is now developing a project set in Lisbon about an undocumented Bangladeshi woman who migrates after a cyclone, and is pursuing a television adaptation of J. Courtney Sullivan’s novel “The Cliffs.”
Watch the clip here:
