Anuparna Roy’s first feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees (2025), won her the Best Director award in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival. A year later she returned to Venice with Lovers in the Blue Night, a drama of Bengali immigrants struggling to survive in a harsh Mumbai.
Shot on location, Roy’s film tackles class and gender issues in a visually opulent style, intimate camerawork supporting exceptional performances. I met with Roy at the Busan International Film Festival, where we had a candid discussion about homosexuality, censorship, and her training.
The Film Stage: How did you learn filmmaking?
Anuparna Roy: All my friends were from film schools, and I kind of learned along with them. They kind of taught me.
As a Westerner, I couldn’t distinguish among the languages in the film. First, how many languages do you speak?
I only know English, Bengali—the regional Bengali, not the elite Bengali. Also I know Hindi, because I’m forced to know it. And to survive in Bombay, I’m forced to know Marathi.
What languages do you use in the movie?
Three: Jalkau Marathi, again a regional and not elite Marathi. Sylheti Bengali, a very regional Bengali language which is getting wiped out by the so-called elite Bengali languages. Gujarati—there’s a little Gujarati all along. Hindi, of course, because the center of the film is situated in Bombay. So Hindi is used in a very subtle way.
Your lead characters are often criticized because they don’t speak Hindi well. But I’m afraid of missing the distinctions between their dialects.
The languages and dialects force people to act in certain ways. Let’s start with the obvious: India is a country whose borders were created by Europeans.
But if you go 30 kilometers in any direction, you will find a different language, a different culture. Showcasing internal migration is a central theme of the film. One way to do that is to show how all these different languages are coming together. When people end up living in the same lane, their lives become intermingled with each other. One life affects another, sometimes by chance.
Chasing identity is a constant struggle in Bombay. Nobody dares to talk about these problems because they’re afraid to step away from the mainstream industry.
So you introduce four main characters who are both struggling to find their identity, and find a way to present that identity to others. All the while trying to find some sort of connection with them.
How will these characters cope? Due to forced, imposed migration, they lost their origins, their roots. Now they are carrying memories of their past. All of them: Karim, Ameena, Sukka, Pinky. Omi as well. Omi was originally a deeper, more layered character. He is a survivor of the Gujarat Riots in 2002. I couldn’t include that because I had been threatened. My life was under threat.
Problems India faces.
India has many problems, third world problems. Not P-5 problems. [Note: The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.]
Let’s talk about some basic things. In Indian films nowadays, showcasing sex scenes is something like so cool, you know? I’m telling you though, the crisis of cinema is due to the fact that film narratives are very weak. I put myself in there, I’m a very weak narrative storyteller. It’s a struggle for us to understand cinema. But our legends like Rima Das, Nandita Das, Mira Nair, Zoya Akhtar, Vishal Bhardwaj, Rohan Kanawade, and Tribeny Rai are amazing. For that matter, I’ve learned a lot about craft from Alfonso Cuarón and Joachim Trier. They’ve inspired me a lot.
So, the problems of India… If I start talking about that, the interview will never end, so let’s not do that.
What about the problems with your film? You deal openly with homosexuality—is that an issue that will alarm censorship boards?
Of course there is censorship pressure. But in my films you will find only bonding and love and friendship. I’m pretty sure bonding, love, and friendship will not harm society.
Let’s talk about how you made Lovers. How long was the production?
We had three months for pre-production. But I’ve been writing this film for the past three years. I started long ago, before I won in Venice [Songs of Forgotten Trees won Best Director in the Orizzonti section of the Venice Film Festival].
So before Venice, I was hoping to get a producer, which is what happened. To be very honest, Vikas Kumar and Sharib Khan, who is from the U.S., these two people are the pillar of my career. They signed me for Lovers in the Blue Night before I went to Venice. They got the film done. They put their hard-earned money into it. They took the risk without ever knowing if the film would come out.
So, to answer your question, we had three months of pre-production and then 45 days of shooting.
Anuparna Roy
Did you shoot everything on location?
Not the bar scenes, they were in a studio. But otherwise real locations. Real slum areas near the beaches. It was a tough location scout. It’s very hard to break the stereotypes about Bombay. You talk about slums and all the Hindi films show is Dharavi.
I needed to find another area in order to show something viewers had never seen before.
About the bar, which is both a nightclub for meeting women and a phone sex call center where the men are in rooms next to the sex workers. Is that something that happens in India?
No, it is a very fictional thing which we made up. But there are call centers where the idea is to keep the clients on the line as long as possible to increase their bills.
You have a wonderful overhead shot where you reveal room after room of client and worker.
I knew I didn’t have time to explain the different rooms, so I thought why not do a montage of them? At first I thought four or five shots to show this world. One guy is talking, another is masturbating, and so on.
You did it in one take instead. Is that something you worked out with your cinematographer Debjit Samanta?
I’m very particular when it comes to taking shots because I feel I’m weak in that area. I need to learn a lot. Out of that insecurity, whenever I write a scene, I make sure how I’m seeing it. So most of the shots are in the script already.
I was really impressed with your transit scenes, on bikes and scooters, flatbed trucks, buses. How did you plan them?
The bike shot, the moment when Sukka first meets Karim, was pretty much inspired by Robert Bresson. I used to read his Notes on the Cinematographer a lot and how he used to start with small, close shots. That really inspired me. I’m like, “Why not? Why not?”
There’s another long shot of Sukkah crying at the beach, standing in the water. Karim comes up behind him. I wanted it to be as long a lens as possible. Karim can’t go in the water because of his past. We improvised a lot. I ask a lot from the cinematographer, but it’s always a collaborative effort. Debjit Samanta and I also worked together on Songs of Forgotten Trees.
Did you have to get permission to shoot on the streets?
This time we had enough money for a location manager. It was a privilege to shoot that way. No struggle—just money and just getting the right shot.
Can you talk about casting?
[Laughing] Oh, it was pretty much nepotism. Pritam Pilania (Karim) is my friend. He’s a great actor, so hiring him was easy. So that helped me a lot. Casting Neelima [Sharma, who plays Ameena) was through an audition. Her face really grabbed my attention. She had these raw, amazing features, just like Ameena. I wanted someone who was pretty, because “beauty shall come with destruction.”
Bhushan Shimpi (Sukka) worked with me in Songs of Forgotten Trees. It’s easy to hire someone who’s vibrant and ready to do things. And Jatin Sarin, Omi or Omran, is also my friend. I knew that he desperate to portray a character like Omran, to show his struggle. He was the perfect choice, able to carry all the trauma of the Gujarat riots. It was painful to remove his story, to chop out his scenes. This was making a film with friends.
You still have his scenes?
Yes. We’ll turn them into a short once the government’s gone.
Can you explain how the riots affected him?
Omran and his mother left Gujarat in 2002 after his elder sister was raped and murdered by political goons. She had gone outside to buy mutton for dinner. When his mother found her dead body, it had been chopped into pieces like mutton. It was very hard to differentiate the pieces of her body from the mutton she had purchased. Now in Bombay, she buys mutton, cooks it, and throws it out. Over and over. I wanted to show food trauma because it’s never discussed.
You felt you weren’t allowed to include it in the film?
No, because they’d do the same thing to me. I want to live.
Do you feel unsafe as a director?
Yes, because I talked about Palestine at Venice. The government didn’t like it. They tweeted about it, and then deleted the tweet. Listen, if you’re given a mic on an international stage and you are aware about the miseries around you, will you sing a song? Every time they give me a mic, I’ll talk about miseries and uncomfortable topics.
So you’re not going to make a rom-com?
No, never. But my next film is romantic. It comes with ethnic cleansing, beauty through destruction.
But in your films you seem to be an optimist, to believe that people can get better.
Yeah. But I’m not a social worker. I’m very narcissistic in terms of making films as a director. The language of empathy is something I’m trying to bring into my films. It’s not easy because coming from a privileged background, it’s easy to emphasize poverty and sell poverty to Europe or America. Knowing that a portion of the world is burning and we are having espresso here, talking in an air-conditioned room.
Lovers in the Blue Night screened at the 2026 Busan International Film Festival.
The post Anuparna Roy on Lovers in the Blue Night and Conveying Empathy in a World on Fire first appeared on The Film Stage.
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