Indian filmmaker Anuparna Roy has been carrying Ameena’s story since childhood.
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.
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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
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.
One choice stands out
One choice stands out. Karim produces rat poison and kills rats in wealthy Mumbai housing societies, a job Roy based on someone she saw doing the same work in the city’s Andheri East suburb. She calls the image of him coming home from that job to kiss another man “no less than revolutionary,” and says placing the two things side by side felt deeply political to her.
Displacement links this film to Roy’s debut. Both stories draw on floods Roy experienced growing up in a coastal region near the Bangladesh border, close to the Bay of Bengal, and both send their characters into exile from a destroyed home. Where her first film explored two women, this one turns to two men and the duality of bisexuality.
Upcoming stories include “In the Shadow in the Light,” a romantic feature about a dysfunctional marriage modeled partly on her parents, and an untitled project about a woman’s sexual transit.
