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. 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. 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 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. 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. When the shoot’s original cast changed following the disruption from July, Karim stepped in to read opposite another actor during Zoom rehearsals.
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. 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. 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. Courtney Sullivan’s novel “The Cliffs.”
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