Rubaiyat Hossain on bodies, beauty in The Difficult Bride

Rubaiyat Hossain is talking bodies, beauty and power as Variety unveils an exclusive clip from The Difficult Bride, the first Bangladeshi feature headed to Venice's Horizons competition before Toronto and BFI London. The supernatural feminist drama grew from a childhood Dhaka salon story and her embodied experience of womanhood.

Key Takeaways

• Variety unveiled an exclusive clip from Rubaiyat Hossain's The Difficult Bride, a supernatural feminist drama.
• It is the first Bangladeshi feature set to screen at the Venice Film Festival, in Horizons competition.
• The story grew from a Dhaka beauty-parlor tale Hossain heard at age seven and from her own embodied experience of being a woman.
• After Venice, the film continues to the Toronto and BFI London film festivals; Films Boutique handles world sales.
• Hossain frames beauty pressures as a patriarchal system that women can also uphold, not only men.

What is happening with Rubaiyat Hossain and The Difficult Bride?

According to Variety's exclusive report, the filmmaker discusses how bodies, beauty standards and power shape her new feature as a festival clip arrives.

The Difficult Bride will become the first Bangladeshi feature to screen at Venice when it bows in Horizons. It then moves to Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival. For more festival and screen alerts, see our Streaming & TV Alerts hub.

Where did the idea for The Difficult Bride begin?

Hossain traces the idea to a story she heard at seven while visiting a Dhaka beauty parlor with her mother. "There was a bride who died there," she told Variety. She says she already visualized the tale then—in sepia—and it stayed with her.

That salon, Mayfair, became the film's setting. It 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 later, her gender-studies background and personal experience shaped the feature.

"My own self and my own body became a part of the film," she said. "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."

How does Rubaiyat Hossain connect bodies, beauty and power?

Hossain does not place blame solely on men. Azmeri Haque Badhon plays the salon owner who enforces beauty standards on Zaineen, including facial injections Hossain says mirror treatment common in Bangladeshi salons.

"It's also about how women can be some of the biggest upholders and sustainers of patriarchy," she said. "It's not only men; women also participate in this. It's a system of power."

She argues those pressures travel beyond South Asia, citing women from Mexico, Guatemala, Bangladesh or Vermont facing similar ideas of beauty and submission. The Dhaka backdrop carries traces of July 2024 unrest via Rikita Nondine Shimu's character, Minoti, including surveillance and policing of women's clothing and behavior. Hossain resists calling the film a direct July chronicle, saying she built a Dhaka reality with political violence outside and ongoing violence against women.

She places the film with Under Construction and Made in Bangladesh as a class trilogy—middle-class, working-class, then ultra-wealthy Gulshan-Baridhara life. "Even in this gilded cage, even with all these privileges, you can't be free," she said.

Who stars, who produced it, and what is next?

Karim, making her acting debut, was originally Hossain's assistant director and stepped in after cast changes following July disruption. The cast also includes Sunerah Kamal plus Badhon and Shimu—all Bangladesh National Film Award winners.

The film is a co-production of France's Les Films de l'Après-Midi, Bangladesh's Khona Talkies, Portugal's Midas Filmes, Norway's Barentsfilm and Germany's Tandem Production, supported by the first Fondazione Prada Film Fund. Films Boutique handles world sales.

Hossain teaches part-time at Smith College and has launched a grant and mentorship program for Bangladeshi women filmmakers. She is developing a Lisbon-set project about an undocumented Bangladeshi woman who migrates after a cyclone, and pursuing a TV adaptation of J. Courtney Sullivan's novel The Cliffs.

"I'm not tied to social realism anymore," she said. "I really relied on my body and my instincts to make creative decisions."