Italian fashion house Prada is entering the film production space by setting up the Fondazione Prada Film Fund to sustain independent cinema. The new fund will be managed by former Directors’ Fortnight chief Paolo Moretti in collaboration with film programmer Rebecca De Pas.
The Prada fund, which is starting out with a €1.5 million ($1.6 million) pot, will support 10-12 selected feature films per year with no geographical or genre restrictions. The fund will be launched during the Venice Film Festival through a call for entries.
“Cinema is for us a laboratory for new ideas and a space of cultural education. For this reason, we have decided to actively contribute to the realization of new works and to the support of auteur cinema,” said Miuccia Prada in a statement. She is the owner of the Italian luxury group and head of Fondazione Prada, the cultural institution that she established alongside her husband Patrizio Bertelli in 1993.
“For over 20 years, the Fondazione has been investigating these languages in different ways, thus advocating a free, demanding and visionary idea of cinema,” she added. “Through this fund we intend to deepen and broaden a dialogue with creation and contemporary experimentation.”
The choice of Prada-supported projects “will be based exclusively on criteria such as quality, originality and vision, with the aim to concretely contribute to the film’s crucial development, production and post-production phases,” a Fondazione Prada statement said.
Moretti told Variety the Prada fund will be dedicated to films “that seek to find new storytelling solutions and take on new challenges.” He pointed out that projects “that try to depict the world in a different and contemporary way often have difficulties getting financing and trust from industrial systems that often tend to be prone to being conservative.”
Unlike the Prada-supported Miu Miu Women’s Tales series of shorts — which is an integral component of the Venice Days section at Venice and features works all loosely inspired by Miu Miu clothes and accessories—– the Prada Film Fund projects will have no ties whatsoever to the fashion brand.
“We will not ask anyone to wear Prada in the films that we are boarding,” Moretti said. He underlined that there will be no creative constraints of any type and that the fund is open to directors at all stages of their careers.
“The idea is to support a selection of films that is varied and diverse, somewhat in the spirit of the selection of a festival,” Moretti added. As is the case with projects selected by other funds for the arts, the selected projects will be able to benefit from a Fondazione Prada Film Fund Foundation label as a mark of quality.
The Fondazione Prada, which has its headquarters in a Milan arts center that has a bar designed by Wes Anderson, has long been active in the film sphere. It recently hosted a major exhibit of storyboards by more than 50 famed filmmakers and animators including Martin Scorsese, Hayao Miyazaki, Federico Fellini, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson and Alfred Hitchcock.
Under Moretti’s guidance, its Cinema Godard movie theater has stepped up its screenings series and onstage conversations with name directors including Alfonso Cuarón, Xavier Dolan, Luca Guadagnino, Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke and Rebecca Zlotowski, to name a few.
