“It’s soft money with no strings,” says Fondazione Prada’s Paolo Moretti on the launch of €1.5m fund

Italy’s Fondazione Prada has officially launched its new film fund, which has an annual €1.5m to back 10-12 independent films.

First announced in Cannes in May by the fashion brand’s cultural foundation, the Fondazione Prada Film Fund set out its investment criteria and application deadlines at the Venice Film Festival today (September 1).

Speaking to Screen ahead of the launch, the head of the film fund Paolo Moretti said applications are open to “a first-time filmmaker or a very experienced master who maybe wants to try something new or something visionary. We don’t want to put boundaries on this, which opens it up to a lot of projects.”

The fund will provide up to €250,000 for each of the projects it backs, based on criteria such as quality, originality and vision, without restrictions on geography, theme, genre or language.

Funding will go to a project’s main production company, which must have produced at least two feature films that have premiered at an international film festival.

Projects in development, production or postproduction can apply. The fund will invest €15-80,000 for projects in development; €30-250,000 for production; and €15-100,000 for post-production.

“It is soft money, but with no strings,” said Moretti, the former director of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. “You’re not forced to spend it or to inject it into the industry of one particular country. Of course, there will be some rules about what you can do with this money. We will have some vigilance for the way in which this money will be spent. There will be some boundaries, but not artistically.”

“We hope that our support and the fact that a film project is being highlighted by our group of experts with wide experience in film festival programming acts as a sort of validation. Hopefully, it will help to trigger new financial possibilities and attention for the project,” added Moretti.

Fondazione Prada

Moretti said the fund represents an evolution of Fondazione Prada’s activities around cinema for the past 20 years, which includes supporting film restorations through to supporting Alejandro González Iñárritu’s VR installation in 2017 or its regular screening programme in its Cinema Godard in Milan. “There is a mutual attraction right between the Fondazione and cinema. This is yet another chapter of this long history.”

The film fund’s launch marks the first time that Fondazione Prada has provided financing for films “in a structured and systemic way,” said Moretti. “The idea is to work like a film festival – to compose a selection like you would at a festival. We want to cover a large spectrum of styles, geography and approaches, and to select projects that represent the state of contemporary arthouse cinema.”

Asked if there is kind of film style that Fondazione Prada wants to be associated with, Moretti said there is a relationship between the Fondazione and Prada but that it “never translates into any kind of artistic pressure. The Film Fund has no artistic constraints whatsoever. Quite the opposite – the more the radical and visionary the project is, the more interested we are. We want the filmmakers and the artists we choose to be completely free.”

Selection committee

Moretti developed the fund with project manager Rebecca De Pas, who is also a member of the International Film Festival Rotterdam selection committee. The Fondazione Prada was created in 1993 and is headed by president and director, Miuccia Prada.

An international selection committee will choose which projects to back, with applications opening today and accepted until October 17. The selected projects will be announced between January and February 2026. 

The selection committee includes programmer and producer Violeta Bava; Paolo Bertolin, film curator and artistic director of New Zealand International Film Festival; Émilie Bujès, artistic director of Festival Visions du Réel; Michelle Carey, former director of Melbourne International Film Festival; Deepti D’Cunha, programmer and former artistic director of MAMI Mumbai Film Festival; Claire Diao, critic and programmer and founder of Sudu Connexion distribution company; Sergio Fant, selector and curator; Evgeny Gusyatinskiy, programmer and critic; Daniela Persico, programmer, critic and director of the Bellaria Film Festival; Alessandra Speciale, curator and director of the FESCAAAL; and Yaoting Zhang, producer.

Moretti said: “The collective dimension of this is important to highlight. It’s what I treasure most from my experience in festivals. A selection is never the work of one person, but the result of a lot of discussion. Of course, there is one person who, let’s say, grants a sort of coherence to the project. But, for me, what makes a very good programme is when you find the unexpected and when you work even against yourself, in terms of sensibilities, but it’s still coherent and consistent. The goal is to create this sort of collective intelligence mechanism, which hopefully will result in a great selection of projects.”

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