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

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