Fondazione Prada Launches 1.5M-Euro Film Fund To Support Indie Movies

MILAN — While tariffs looming over the film industry have led the conversation on the opening day of the Cannes Film Festival, Miuccia Prada has quietly upped the ante of her commitment and support to the seventh art.

On Wednesday, Fondazione Prada revealed the creation of the Fondazione Prada Film Fund, a 1.5-million-euro yearly effort aimed at supporting independent cinema and works of high artistic value, further enhancing the cultural institution’s 20-year commitment to the field.

“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,” Prada, who is president and director of the foundation, said in a statement. “For over 20 years, the Fondazione has been investigating these languages in different ways, thus advocating a free, demanding and visionary idea of cinema. Through this fund we intend to deepen and broaden a dialogue with creation and contemporary experimentation.”

The fund will debut in the fall via a call for entries. Each year, a jury will select 10 to 12 feature films with no geographical or genre restriction, basing its picks on criteria including quality, originality and vision. 

The jury will decide the specific financing for each movie selected, addressing films in three different phases such as development, production and post-production. The ultimate goal is to support heterogeneous works in terms of language, production scale and artistic vision to contribute to the plurality and vitality of contemporary cinema.

The project has been developed by Paolo Moretti, curator of Fondazione Prada’s Cinema Godard program, director of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes Film Festival from 2018 to 2022, head of the cinema department at ECAL — or École cantonale d’art de Lausanne — and director of Cinémas du Grütli in Geneva. He collaborated with Rebecca De Pas, a member of the selection committee at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and codirector of FiDLab — an international coproduction platform — from 2009 to 2019.

This is the latest initiative in a long streak of film-related projects the cultural institution has launched to explore the art of filmmaking tracing back to the early 2000s. For instance, from 2003 to 2005, Fondazione Prada partnered with the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff, presenting the preview of a film selection in New York and Milan, such as Chinese director Wong Kar-wai’s feature film “2046.”

From 2004 to 2006, in collaboration with the Venice Biennale, the foundation launched a film recovery and restoration program, involving a selection of forgotten or misunderstood Italian genre films shot between the ‘50s and the ‘70s; Chinese works distributed before the 1949 Revolution; rare films belonging to Japanese popular production, and Soviet musical comedy films from the 1930s to the ‘70s. 

Other projects through the years have ranged from Francesco Vezzoli’s “Trilogia della Morte” video installations inspired by two works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and presented in Venice and Milan to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Flesh, Mind and Spirit” in 2009, featuring a selection of films that marked the director’s education and artistic vision. This initiative paved the way for the “Soggettiva” series of movie selections that has involved filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Danny Boyle and Ava DuVernay and artists such as John Baldessari, Damien Hirst, Goshka Macuga and Luc Tuymans, to name a few.

The Fondazione Prada outpost in Milan itself is filled with movie references, starting from its highly Instagrammed café Bar Luce, designed by Wes Anderson and referencing two masterpieces of Italian Neorealism like Vittorio De Sica’s 1951 film “Miracle in Milan” and Luchino Visconti’s 1960 movie “ Rocco and His Brothers.”

In 2018, the cultural institution’s Milan location launched a regular screening program in its movie theater, mixing classics, experimental works, previews and rare and restored movies.

Masterclasses and public meetings with established and emerging figures on the international film scene — including Anderson and Almodóvar, as well as the likes of Spike Lee, Luca Guadagnino, Dario Argento, Alfonso Cuarón, Joanna Hogg and Xavier Dolan, to name a few — further contributed to drawing crowds to the movie theater.

As reported, in 2023 Fondazione Prada renamed the theater Cinema Godard to pay permanent tribute to the French New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard. The move followed in the footsteps of Fondazione Prada becoming the only international institution to host two permanent projects by the late Franco Swiss director. Both were specifically conceived for the Milan venue and personally supervised by the filmmaker during their installation in 2019. 

For “Le Studio d’Orphée,” Godard relocated his atelier and recording and editing studio to Fondazione Prada, setting a living and working space bringing together the original technical equipment used for his last films from 2010 to 2019, as well as furniture, books, paintings and other personal items from his studio home in Rolle, Switzerland. Here, visitors have the opportunity of attending the screening of his 2018 feature film “Le Livre d’image” in the physical place where it was created. 

For the elevator of Fondazione Prada’s Torre tower, Godard conceived “Accent-soeur,” an audio installation combining the soundtrack of “Histoire(s) du cinema,” an eight-part video project the director began in 1988 and completed in 1998 that narrates the complex history of “the seventh art.”

Currently, American director, writer and visual artist Miranda July’s research project “A Kind of Language” is on display at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio outpost in Milan’s landmark Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II shopping arcade. Running until Sept. 8, the exhibition investigates the creative process that precedes a film’s realization, showcasing storyboards and other preparatory materials.

Up next is an immersive exhibition conceived by Iñárritu that will open Sept. 18 and run through Feb. 26, 2026, and which will delve into the cultural and cinematographic dimension of the director’s first feature film “Amores Perros,” released in 2000.