Last year at the Venice Film Festival, Italy’s Fondazione Prada officially launched its film fund, aimed at sustaining independent cinema from around the world without any restrictions on theme, genre or language. This year, it‘s back on the Lido with tangible proof that the initiative has borne fruit.

The fund’s first edition is among backers of Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain’s “The Difficult Bride,” which is competing in the fest’s Horizons section. Meanwhile, winners of its second round of financing will be announced in February.

Variety talked to Paolo Moretti, the former Cannes Directors’ Fortnight chief, who is managing the fund in collaboration with film programmer Rebecca De Pas, about its first-year journey.

How has the last year unfolded for the fund?

We have been pleasantly surprised. In a very short time, we’ve managed to establish a real line of communication with a large segment of the industry. We had a truly massive number of projects applying, roughly 1,200. It usually takes time for new initiatives like this to gain a foothold, but the interest in our proposed format — which is relatively unique in the world of film funding — was immediate. We then had to deal with this huge volume of projects. From one perspective this was thrilling, as it gave us a vivid picture of the vitality of contemporary cinema and showed us just how many people still believe in it. We are interested in cinema that breaks new ground. We subsequently adapted our structure — specifically the number of readers and collaborators — to handle this volume, because we wanted to treat every single project submitted to us with the seriousness and attention it deserved.

What tweaks did you make?

When we announced the 14 selected projects in Berlin, there were only supposed to be 12. We managed to support two additional ones because in the end we saw that, despite the [limited] overall amount [of resources] we have available for the fund, not everyone had requested the maximum amount, so this allowed us to adjust the support in quantitative terms. Then we started following the progress of the projects. From February onwards, we started getting updates and news, including the wonderful news of Rubaiyat Hossain’s film being selected for Venice. At the same time, we were trying to think about how to evolve the system and improve it. One of the first ideas that came to us was to separate the submission of projects that are in production phase — which I would say are the vast majority — from those in development and post-production to try to balance out these three segments.

What is the criteria in terms of the budgets of the films you are supporting?

There is no written criteria because we want to give ourselves the possibility of making exceptions if we fall in love with a project, so there’s no budget limit. However, the discussions we had, and the final selection process, tell us this: We ended up choosing projects that cost between a few hundred thousand euros up to five million. In short, this is the range. And, among other things, this is the budget range at which most experimental arthouse cinema is produced, and that is precisely what we want to support. But that doesn’t mean that if we come across a project that might be a little more expensive, but that resonates very, very pertinently with the spirit of the fund, we won’t support it.

Regarding the overall budget, what is the prospect that the €1.5 million ($1.6 million) pot could increase?

For now, that is the available budget. Clearly the number of projects we’ve received tells us that there is a need for this support. So I’d say we can’t rule out an increase. Personally, I can only hope so. But I think the foundation is already doing something truly unique and extremely useful and generous.