Venice Film Festival: How Anuparna Roy and Lovers in the Blue Night turn escape into art

Songs of Forgotten Trees director, who’s back in Venice after last year’s Orizzonti Best Director win, is rewriting who gets to be seen, and how, in Indian cinema

Updated - September 12, 2026 05:34 am IST

Lovers in the Blue Night director Anuparna Roy at Venice Film Festival, 2026. | Photo Credit: Stephanie Cornfield

Three years ago, Anuparna Roy fled the trappings of an impending marriage and left her Narayanpur village in Bengal’s Purulia to go study and work in call centres in Mumbai. The city now serves as the cinematic canvas for the self-taught director-screenwriter’s personal stories of migration and loss.

If her 2025 debut feature Songs of the Forgotten Trees follows a migrant aspiring actress and part-time sex worker sharing a rented Mumbai apartment and forming an intimate bond (which travelled to the Venice International Film Festival), 2026’s Lovers in the Blue Night traces the entangled lives of four migrants on the city’s margins: a closeted gay husband, his lonely wife, a thief and a pimp.

Karim (Pritam Pilania) and Amina (Neelima Sharma) in a still from Lovers in the Blue Night. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Roy, 28, was shivering while she received the Best Director award last year in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section of the world’s oldest film festival — the first Indian to win this award [11 years after Chaitanya Tamhane had won the Orizzonti Best Film award for Court; 2014]. Nervous, she’d forgotten her award acceptance speech and instead called to end the Gaza genocide. That came naturally, for Roy wears her politics on her sleeve.

This year, however, she is more assured of herself as she returns to Venice with Lovers in the Blue Night, competing in the same category a second time in a consecutive year — yet another feat for an Indian filmmaker at the festival. She’ll also be a jury member at the Busan International Film Festival in October, where Lovers… will have its Asian premiere at the festival’s ‘A Window on Asian Cinema’ segment.

Asian cinema holds a special place for Roy, who borrowed inspiration from the films of Tsai Ming-liang and Wong Kar-wai to create the art design in Lovers…, in particular to the blue night bar — with mirrored lights, and long lanes as a character, not just as space. And, “I didn’t want to showcase women as dancing or shoot anything vulgar. I know my audiences are very much aware what’s happening inside the bar. I want to get rid of the ‘male gaze’ in my film. That’s one responsibility I have taken. Instead, we showed fictional hotline cabins,” she says.

In her sophomore, Roy builds on Ameena’s story, a bonded labourer at their Narayanpur home, whose husband Karim was a closeted gay man, and gives them an imaginary escape to Mumbai. She calls it her “responsibility” to platform marginalised stories in films.

Neelima Sharma as Ameena in a still from Lovers in the Blue Night. | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

“I’m a woman from a third world country. I can’t keep cinema and politics separate. For me, losing my friend was political. Leaving my house and becoming a migrant was political. My character Karim killing rats is as political as kissing a guy,” says Roy. If films like Roma, The Color of Pomegranates, The Zone of Interest, Moonlight, Manta Ray, and Hot Milk can “talk about the sociopolitical situation of their countries; why can’t we?” she asks.

And further adds, “In my films, you’ll definitely find politics but I don’t like such films which exaggerates the director’s political idea more than the narrative.” Party politics has “done nothing for the women…I’ve seen a lot growing up in Bengal. It’s a hopeless situation there.” If her father kept Roy away from her best friend Jhuma Nath, who’s “not from [their] caste”, a government’s initiative for Dalit women forced her friend into marrying a much older man. Songs... ruminates on the loss.

Roy seeks escape or freedom in nature/river, a recurring motif in her films. A young Roy used to be mesmerised by the river imagery her grandmother conjured up in tales. Only to realise years later that like herself, her grandmother too was never allowed to cross her village’s border to go see a river or nature’s beauty. For Roy, these stories became her ammunition to flee. “The conflicts my father and I share are good. If that gets resolved, I won’t be able to make films,” she says.

Though she wasn’t allowed to step out as a child, the outside world came to her through films on the television: Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara and Titash Ekti Nodir Naam, and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. Years later, she was moved by SRK’s Swades, My Name is Khan, and contemporary Bengali parallel films Bakita Byaktigato and Asha Jaoar Majhe/Labour of Love.