Anuparna Roy Returns to Venice With Migrant Love Story — SkimNews
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- Anuparna Roy returns to Venice’s Horizons competition a year after “Songs of Forgotten Trees” made her the first Indian filmmaker to win the section’s best director prize.
- Lovers in the Blue Night premieres in Horizons, with international sales handled by Parallax.
- Roy’s second feature follows four migrants moving through Mumbai, widening the confined two-woman focus of her debut, which was made under difficult funding conditions.
- Ameena’s story began as a rebellious escape from marriage, but Roy came to see that route as “another loop of patriarchy” rather than simple freedom.
- Karim produces rat poison and kills rats in wealthy Mumbai housing societies, a detail Roy based on someone she observed in Andheri East; his homecoming kiss with another man felt revolutionary to her.
- Roy’s two features draw on floods and destroyed homes near the Bangladesh border, but the new film shifts from two women to two men while exploring bisexuality and ordinary desires for intimacy and tenderness.
Why it matters: Roy’s return gives the Horizons competition a filmmaker arriving one year after its best-director win, while the four-migrant ensemble broadens her earlier two-woman story. The move from a difficult, confined production to a more professional set, alongside a refusal to turn love into a simple escape, defines the concrete change in her second feature.
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