Anuparna Roy has arrived – with a roar that refuses to be softened.
The 31-year-old independent filmmaker from Purulia, West Bengal, won the Orizzonti Award for best director at the 82nd Venice Film Festival for her debut feature, Songs of Forgotten Trees, becoming only the second Indian woman after Mira Nair to receive a top honour at the storied festival, reported Variety.
For an artiste who describes herself, with disarming candour, as a “student of cinema”, the win is less a coronation than a statement of intent: There is space for Indian stories told on their own terms.
Anuparna is clear about her audience. “Those who seek stories that stimulate the intellect — stories that go beyond mere entertainment,” she said.
She knows her films may upset or discomfit viewers; she also believes they will resonate. That conviction is rooted in a life far from film school privilege.
A literature graduate who once worked a call centre job in Delhi to avoid early marriage and gain financial independence, Anuparna inched towards film through journalism, then saved for years to self-fund her short Run to the River (2023).
A chance encounter with producers opened the path to a first feature; within months, Songs of Forgotten Trees had the backing of industry stalwart Ranjan Singh and the support of Anurag Kashyap as presenter.
Set in Mumbai, Songs of Forgotten Trees follows two migrant women from different worlds – Thooya, an aspiring actor who sometimes exchanges intimacy for opportunity, and Swetha, a call centre employee, reported The Week.
What begins as a pragmatic living arrangement in an upscale apartment evolves into a tender, complicated relationship, as both navigate desire, precarity, and the city’s relentless churn.
The film’s title gestures to the Hollong tree as a quiet metaphor for erasure and memory: things once vibrant, now fading, yet stubbornly present.
Anuparna’s methods are as unvarnished as her themes. Formally untrained, she avoids conventional shot grammar in favour of long, observational takes and natural light, letting the rhythms of daily life carry the narrative.
She shot the film in her own apartment and had the actors move in during production to deepen the lived-in intimacy on screen. Reviews have praised the film’s restraint and clarity; The Hollywood Reporter called it “an anguished portrait of what it takes for women to survive.”
Personal history powers the work. Anuparna grew up witnessing systems that diminished girls: a grandmother married at nine; a friend, Jhuma, married at 12 and never seen again.
“The personal is political,” she told the BBC. “When I was a child, I was given rice according to my body weight, while boys got books – that’s political.”
The characters in Songs of Forgotten Trees are inspired by these memories, transmuted into fiction to protect real lives without blunting their truth.
Anuparna’s cinema sits in conversation with a canon of politically charged filmmakers – Alfonso Cuarón, Nadine Labaki, Jafar Panahi, Jia Zhangke, Bahman Ghobadi – but she insists on local specificity.
“Foreign films motivate you to think outside the box,” she told the BBC, “but the geographical, economic, and political realities of your own land must shape your stories.”
That groundedness is also why she resists the lure of mainstream gloss.
Asked if she’d make a conventional commercial film, the answer is firm: “I can’t make sugar-coated cinema. I have to represent the world we live in, even if it upsets people.”
