Rubaiyat Hossain’s ‘The Difficult Bride’ Selected for TIFF 2026

Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain’s latest feature, The Difficult Bride, has been officially selected for the 51st Toronto International Film Festival, where it will be presented in the Centrepiece programme as a North American premiere. The festival will run from September 10 to 20, 2026. The selection follows the film’s inclusion in the Orizzonti competition at the upcoming 83rd Venice International Film Festival. Directed by Hossain, the 87-minute psychological horror film is an international co-production involving France, Bangladesh, Portugal, Norway and Germany. Set in contemporary Dhaka, the film follows a bride-to-be preparing for

‘Mukh O Mukhosh’ at 70: The Birth of Modern Bangladeshi Cinema

Bangladesh marks 70 years today since the release of Mukh O Mukhosh, the film widely regarded as the starting point of the country’s organised feature-film industry. Directed by Abdul Jabbar Khan, it premiered at Roopmahal Cinema Hall in Dhaka on 3 August 1956. The opening show was inaugurated by Sher-e-Bangla A. K. Fazlul Huq, who was then Governor of East Pakistan. Produced under the banner of Iqbal Films, Mukh O Mukhosh was the first full-length Bengali-language sound feature made in East Pakistan, the territory that later became Bangladesh. Its importance lies

Bangladesh Reaches Venice Milestone with ‍‍`The Difficult Bride‍‍`

Bangladeshi cinema has achieved a historic milestone as writer, director and producer Rubaiyat Hossain's fourth feature film, The Difficult Bride, has been selected for the Horizons (Orizzonti) Competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The selection marks the first time a Bangladeshi feature film has been included in an official competition section at the Venice Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious cinematic events. The festival's 83rd edition will take place in Venice, Italy, from September 2 to 12, where The Difficult Bride will have its world premiere. Founded in 1932,

Remembering Djibril Diop Mambéty, the Rebel Poet of African Cinema

Today marks the twenty-eighth anniversary of the death of Djibril Diop Mambéty, the Senegalese filmmaker whose formally daring body of work remains central to the history of African cinema. Mambéty died from lung cancer in a Paris hospital on July 23, 1998. He was 53 years old. Born in Colobane, Dakar, in 1945, Mambéty first trained as an actor and worked at Dakar’s Daniel Sorano National Theatre. Although he had theatrical training, he received no formal education in filmmaking and taught himself cinema. His early films, Contras’ City and Badou Boy,

The People, Poverty, and Politics of Amjad Hossain’s Cinema

There is a scene in Golapi Ekhon Traine that I keep thinking about whenever Amjad Hossain comes to mind. Golapi enters a first-class compartment and the passengers tell her this is first class, meant for first-class passengers, not people like her. She does not apologise or leave. She looks at them and says there is no class in Bangladesh, everyone belongs to the same class here. Of course, we know she is not literally right. Bangladesh is divided by money, education, manners and access, and that compartment makes the division ' ...

The Day Tareque Bhai Never Came Home

The noon of 13 August. A noon as dark as night. It was not only a devastating day for five families; a terrible afternoon descended upon our film community as well. We lost Tareque Bhai and Mishuk Bhai. In the same accident, we also lost the microbus driver, Mustafiz—whom my daughter Tantri used to call “Mocham”—Wasim Bhai, the production manager of Kagojer Phool, and Jamal, the craftsman who had come to build a mud house for the film. Dhali Al-Mamun Bhai and Catherine Masud were seriously injured. That day, ' ...

Urban Authorship and Existential Realism in Mazhar Kamran’s Safar Mein Sheher

The City as a Living Character When a specific city becomes the repeated focus of cinema, it ceases to be a mere backdrop. Instead, it transforms into an active participant in the narrative—endowed with its own psychology, memory, and socio-cultural impact. The seismic shifts of history are often mirrored most vividly in these urban character studies. In Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, the post-war crisis and psychological fracture of Rome were powerfully laid bare. Decades later, Federico Fellini used that very same landscape in La Dolce Vita to map the existential emptiness ' ...

From Movieola to Digital: Sameer Ahmed’s Journey

Sameer Ahmed is one of Bangladesh’s most accomplished filmmakers and editors, with a career spanning cinema, television, and advertising. A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, where he specialized in Film Editing, he has directed and edited numerous feature films, television dramas, and commercials for leading organizations such as Airtel, Unilever, and BBC World Service Trust. His acclaimed work on Guerrilla (2011) earned him the Bangladesh National Film Award for Best Editing. He founded Gao Productions in 2006 and now teaches at Jagannath University, mentoring ' ...