Venice Horizons Winner Anuparna Roy Returns to Lido With Mumbai Story of Migrants, Desire and Belonging ‘Lovers in the Blue Night’

Ameena was a bonded laborer in Roy’s hometown, and something she once said about her marriage stayed with the director long after she grew up and moved away. That memory became the seed for “Lovers in the Blue Night,” which premieres in the Horizons competition at the Venice Film Festival a year after Roy’s debut feature, “Songs of Forgotten Trees,” made her the first Indian filmmaker to win the section’s best director prize. David Krumholtz Clarifies He's Putting Acting Career on Hold but Not 'Retiring or Quitting': Disappointments 'Are Starting to Sting More' 'Supergirl' Sets HBO Max Streaming Release Date International sales on the new film are being handled by Parallax. Popular on Variety Roy says “Songs of Forgotten Trees” was a personal story made under difficult funding conditions, built around two women who barely leave a single house. “Lovers in the Blue Night” widens that frame to four migrants moving through Mumbai; she also describes the production itself as far more professional this time, with deadlines and limitations she is still learning to work inside. Asked whether she expected the new film to move into Venice’s main competition rather in Horizons, Roy says she dreamed of it rather than expected it, and that landing in the section again is no disappointment. She still considers herself a new director learning her craft alongside filmmakers she admires. Ameena’s arc did not stay fixed to the facts that Roy remembered. She says her early instinct was rebellious, imagining the character finding real love and leaving her marriage behind. But that path stopped looking like simple freedom as the script developed. “That is also another loop — another loop of patriarchy,” Roy says, describing what looks from the outside like an escape into a happy ending. That refusal to let escape read as simple freedom extends to how Roy treats her characters’ circumstances more broadly. She wanted the migrants’ hardship to shape them without defining them entirely, resisting the idea that displacement should crowd out their ordinary desires for intimacy, jealousy or tenderness. Karim, a closeted gay man married to Ameena, and his lover Sukka, a man trying to break free of caste, sit at the center of that approach. Roy says she wanted a neutral, empathetic language for both men rather than exaggerating poverty or turning their struggle into ideology. Roy frames love itself as a form of resistance for characters, who are punished for wanting things. “When you are lonely or displaced, even a small gesture of intimacy can begin to feel enormous,” she says, describing what she calls the illusion of love: a space where affection, longing, isolation, need and fantasy start to blur together, so that people fall for the possibility of a person as much as the person themselves.