Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain's new feature "The Difficult Bride" will become the first Bangladeshi film to screen at the Venice Film Festival, appearing in the Horizons competition before further stops in Toronto and London. The supernatural feminist drama follows a bride, Zaineen, whose wedding preparations become a battle with her own body, and draws on a story Hossain heard as a child about a bride who died at a Dhaka beauty parlour. The film matters as a rare international platform for Bangladeshi cinema and for its unflinching look at beauty standards, patriarchy and women's autonomy.

Hossain, who first developed the idea as a 2006 short, blends her academic background in gender studies with personal experience, using grotesque and supernatural imagery to convey embodied female experience. The film features Zaineen Chowdhury Karim in her acting debut, alongside Bangladesh National Film Award winners Azmeri Haque Badhon, Rikita Nondine Shimu and Sunerah Kamal, and is set against a Dhaka backdrop shaped by the country's July 2024 unrest. Hossain frames it as the final part of an unofficial trilogy on Bangladeshi womanhood across social classes, following "Under Construction" and "Made in Bangladesh," and has separately launched a grant and mentorship programme for Bangladeshi women filmmakers.