Anuparna Roy returns to Venice with Lovers in the Blue Night, a story of migrants and forbidden desire

Talking about how her childhood memories became the foundation of her latest work, the 28-year-old shares, “I don’t forget people, places and stories. If anyone shares their story, that stays with me.” These memories eventually lead to something exciting: a personal cinematic narrative. This, however, keeps changing shape until she is done with the editing. Her drafts undergo multiple revisions. Scenes are chopped during editing. “Filmmaking is unpredictable. You cannot even rely on your own narrative completely. Before I start the shoot, I have a certain idea. It changes later on. What I write and how it finally turns out is different. That surprises me all the time,” she says.

Before Roy discovered world cinema in her early 20s, she was deeply influenced by her maternal grandmother, who often told her stories of the river. The very first film that moved her was Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960). “Ghatak literally shook me with his realism,” she confesses. Subsequently, a number of movies, including The Color of Pomegranates (1969), The Revenant (2015), Roma (2018), The Zone of Interest (2023) and Haider (2014) left their mark on her. Though she was profoundly impacted by movies, she has not studied filmmaking. What helped her pick up the technical aspects of the craft was working with her filmmaker friends. Both her features are deeply personal and bear her signature touch as she takes an incisive look at people who live on the margins and search for intimate connections.

However, finding funding for such films is not easy. “After I narrated my first feature, a producer told me nobody was going to sit through my film. A friend reassured me saying that there are elements in the film that are personal and no one else has experienced what I have. That gave me the confidence to save money and start working on Songs of Forgotten Tree,” says Roy, who worked for two IT companies without her employers’ knowledge to raise money for the film. After she got caught, her father chipped in. Songs of Forgotten Tree follows Thooya, a migrant and aspiring actress, who secretly works as a part-time sex worker in Mumbai. When she sublets her flat to Swetha, a call-centre employee and a migrant, they form an unexpected connection.

Anuparna Roy has helmed Lovers in the Blue Night.

Once Songs of Forgotten Trees was selected for the Venice Film Festival, Khan and Kumar Media, founded by Sharib Khan and Vikas Kumar, came on board as co-producers and funded its post-production. “After winning the Orizzonti award at Venice, I had money and producers. Khan and Kumar signed me for my next film,” says Roy. Set in Mumbai, Lovers in the Blue Night follows four migrants — a closeted husband, his lonely wife who works in a bar, a small-time thief and a pimp — whose lives intersect through unexpected love, survival and forbidden desire.

What lends Roy’s work a touch of authenticity is her approach to casting. It is “personal. “I don’t believe in casting someone who I don’t know. I want to work with my friends. It is like giving chances to the bestest people so that your work gets easier and you are at peace,” she elaborates. There are times she changes the scene or dialogue on set, and having friends as her actors helps. The film’s ensemble cast features Neelima Sharma, Pritam Pilania, Bhushan Shimpi, Jatin Sarin, Kajal Keshav and Vinod Suryavanshi.

For Roy, the constant struggle is to write and create something that has not yet been delivered. Going forward, she plans to make a few more personal films. “It can be seen as a narcissistic approach. But I can be truthful about what I have experienced and felt. If I’m writing with somebody or if I’m writing someone else’s story, I might not be able to do justice to it,” she says. The two stories that she plans to tell next are about a couple in a long but dysfunctional marriage and a coming-of-age drama that talks about sexual awakening.