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

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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.