Edoardo Ponti has built a small, stubborn body of work around the people history leaves in the margins — the orphaned, the exiled, the displaced. His feature ‘The Life Ahead’ handed Sophia Loren one of her late-career triumphs as a Holocaust survivor raising a migrant boy in an Italian port town. With ‘The Wedding Dress,’ which has just wrapped, Ponti plants himself in the same emotional terrain: the rubble of post-war Europe, and the improbable insistence on tenderness inside it.

The film is set in a displaced persons camp in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, and draws on the true story of two young survivors, Lilly and Ludwig, who meet in the camp and resolve to do the unthinkable — to marry. As Deadline first reported in an exclusive first look, the bride is ultimately forced into an agonizing choice between a passage to family waiting in America and the man she has found among the ruins.

Casting gives the premise an uncanny contemporary charge. The bride is played by Ivanna Sakhno, the Ukrainian actress best known to global audiences as Shin Hati in ‘Ahsoka,’ and the decision to put a Ukrainian performer at the center of a story about wartime displacement quietly collapses the distance between 1945 and now. Opposite her, Lucas Englander (‘Transatlantic’) plays Ludwig, with Billie Boullet (‘A Small Light’), Anika Boyle (‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’), German star Veronica Ferres and Sasha Alexander filling out the ensemble.

For Ponti, the project is both a return and a quiet declaration of independence. ‘The Life Ahead’ earned a Golden Globe nomination and an Oscar nod for Diane Warren’s song, but it was inevitably read through his mother. ‘The Wedding Dress,’ co-written with Victoria Rose, is the kind of European-set, ensemble-driven passion project — more than twelve years in the making — that a director builds to be measured on his own terms. “When I first encountered this extraordinary true love story,” Ponti said, “I was struck not only by its emotional force, but by the courage, empathy, and difficult choices Lilly and Ludwig faced in finding their way into each other’s arms.”

Produced by Envision Media Arts, with Lee Nelson, David Buelow and David Tish producing alongside Ponti, the shoot was completed this month in Bucharest, increasingly Europe’s back lot of choice for period work chasing scale on a budget. No distributor has been attached yet — a conspicuous gap for a Golden Globe-nominated filmmaker, and a reminder that even pedigree now enters a buyers’ market with the picture already in the can.

Tags: Edoardo Ponti, Ivanna Sakhno, production-wrap, The Wedding Dress, WWII