Anuparna Roy, winner of the Orizzonti Best Director award on the 82nd Venice Film Festival for Songs of Forgotten Trees, a 77-minute film drenched in recollections of instances previous and pals misplaced, is in august firm. She is just the fifth director from the subcontinent, after Satyajit Ray (Golden Lion, Aparajito, 1957), Buddhadeb Dasgupta (Special Director Award, Uttara, 2000), Mira Nair (Golden Lion, Monsoon Wedding, 2001), and Chaitanya Tamhane (Orizzonti Best Film, Court, 2014), to carry residence a trophy from the world’s oldest film competition.
Has the world of the lady from West Bengal’s Purulia district modified in a single day? “It has,” she says. “The award places great responsibility on my shoulders. Every step I take from here on will be watched. I am a bit nervous, but also excited.” Roy says the validation for her film from the viewers in Venice was extraordinarily encouraging. “It was great to see the film resonate, cutting across geographical, cultural and linguistic barriers. It was particularly special because it is my first film.”
A nonetheless from Songs of Forgotten Trees
Backed by 7 males
The director, who has simply stepped into her 30s, is certainly one of a number of Indian ladies who’ve, of late, damaged into the worldwide film circuit, with a number of occurring to bag main awards. Roy has joined a small however unique membership of Indian filmmakers — Payal Kapadia, who has triumphed twice at Cannes (the Golden Eye for A Night of Knowing Nothing, 2021, and the Grand Prix for All We Imagine as Light, 2024), Shuchi Talati (Sundance 2024 Audience Award for Girls Will Be Girls), Varsha Bharath (Rotterdam 2025 NETPAC Award for Bad Girl), and Diwa Shah (San Sebastián 2023 Kutxabank New Directors Award for Bahadur – The Brave).
Interestingly, two of those feted titles have had the backing of filmmakers recognized for his or her adrenaline-fuelled, hyper-masculine movies. Anurag Kashyap is a presenter for Songs of Forgotten Trees, whereas Vetri Maaran has produced the Tamil IFFR title Bad Girl. Roy views this in a optimistic gentle. “All seven producers of my film are men,” she says. “Ranjan Singh, who has been backing unconventional stories for a decade now, was with Songs of Forgotten Trees from the very beginning. He gave me a free hand. ‘It is a personal film, and you do what you feel is right,’ he told me.”
Romil Mod, Anuparna Roy, Bibhanshu Rai, Sumi Baghel and friends on the Venice Film Festival
It was Singh who introduced Kashyap on board, says Roy. Each of the opposite producers — Romil Mody, concerned with movies like All We Imagine as Light and Laapata Ladies; Navin Shetty; Sharib Khan; Vikas Kumar; and Bibhanshu Rai, a buddy who has been with her since her brief film Run to the River (2023) — has been an enormous assist, she provides.
After hours of an IT skilled
The English literature graduate from Burdwan University’s Kulti Government College arrived in Mumbai on the finish of 2021, armed with a company job after an aborted shot at a mass communications diploma. “I erroneously thought mass communication would have something to do with filmmaking,” she says.
Roy began writing Songs of Forgotten Trees in early 2022. “Since I now had a job in Mumbai, I knew I would get an apartment. The moment I found the right one, I decided to make the film. It took us a year to figure out if it would be feasible to shoot in the residential society. We began filming at the end of 2023.”
Shot secretly contained in the condo, the film revolves round an aspiring actor Thooya (Naaz Shaikh, who has been Roy’s shut buddy of about six years), who does intercourse work to pay her payments. Thooya sublets the flat — which belongs to her “sugar daddy,” who can be her primary shopper — to an IT gross sales govt, Shweta (Sumi Baghel). In a narrative exploring themes of remembering and forgetting, alienation and assertion, the 2 ladies develop a bond that helps them shut out the noise round them.
Songs of Forgotten Trees was shot covertly contained in the condowhereas Roy labored as an IT skilled throughout the day
The two migrant ladies barely converse, however their relationship is cemented not solely by the area they share but additionally by their gradual understanding of one another’s inside ideas, compulsions, and misgivings as they start to floor. “We had a workshop for three months. The three of us lived in the apartment to understand the complexities of the characters and of new-age relationships,” says Roy.
Threaded with private tales
“The essence was to bring out the memory of Jhuma Nath, my very first childhood friend,” she explains. “My father did not like my friendship with her because she was Dalit. I was in class V when Jhuma got married at 13 and then vanished forever. That sense of loss stayed with me. That is reflected in the film.”
The music within the film is a lullaby that Naaz’s mom used to sing to her. It was included as an aural leitmotif (brief, recurring musical phrase tied to a specific individual, place, or concept). “It is associated with the good memories of her mother that the character played by Naaz wants to reconnect with,” says Roy. “A lot of Purulia will always be inside me. I still talk in my own language, which is very different from the Bangla spoken by elite Bengalis.”
Anuparna Roy
She by no means misses a possibility to go to her native place. “I make sure I go to my maternal grandmother’s home. The house is still there, but nobody lives there anymore. I see the poverty around there. People around Noapara are still a suppressed lot. They are tribals deprived of a great deal,” she says.
Roy plans to make a film set in British-era Bengal that may speak about the true individuals of the world. “I know my film will not change their lives or liberate them from the bane of casteism, but I still want to make it,” she says. “It will be about something that diverges from general notions of nationalism and freedom, and look at their lives through an alternative prism.”
The two migrant ladies barely converse, however their relationship is cemented by their gradual understanding of one another’s inside ideas
Lessons from James Joyce
It was not a lot cinema as literature that sowed in her the seeds of need to inform tales and make movies. “James Joyce’s abstract works, especially Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, inspired me,” says Roy. “I did not understand everything back then. So, I read and re-read to get a real sense of what Joyce was doing. I read The Dubliners and all his other books more than once. They left a lasting impression on me.”
Roy is now engaged on one other Mumbai-set film that can be nothing like Songs of Forgotten Trees. “It will be fast-paced, moody, quirky, and about people on the city’s margins. It will be an experiment,” she says.
The author is a New Delhi-based film critic.
