Filmmaker Anuparna Roy on making 'Lovers in the Blue Night', and exploring its many themes

Still from Lovers In The Blue Night

For filmmaker Anuparna Roy, Venice is beginning to feel like a dream she would rather not wake up from. Her second feature, Lovers in the Blue Night, has returned her to the festival after her debut, Songs of Forgotten Trees (2025), premiered there. This time, the film also won the NETPAC Award. "It's a dream and I don't want to wake up," she says.

The film follows four migrants whose lives intersect in Mumbai, all of them carrying a desire to be seen, heard and, ultimately, to belong somewhere. But the story began much closer to home.

When Roy was young, she knew Amina, one of the domestic workers in her house. "I saw her sleeping all alone inside the mosquito net," she says. When Roy asked why she did not sleep with her husband, Kareem, Amina simply told her, "My husband doesn't want me to sleep with him."

Lovers In The Blue Night is Anuparna Roy's second feature that has made it to Venice Film Festival

The image stayed with her. As she grew older, Roy began to understand the complexities of Amina and Kareem's relationship, particularly Kareem's sexuality and Amina's longing to be seen and heard. "In the beginning, I was very rebellious, and wanted to develop a character that I wanted to give all the love, all the sex, and all the freedom," she says, "But then I realised when life happened to me, finding a husband is not freedom. It is another loop of patriarchy, another loop of suppression."

Mumbai, however, was not chosen because Roy wanted to make yet another film about the city. In fact, she says she was initially intimidated by how much of Mumbai had already been put on screen. "I have already seen brilliant films here based in the city, Dhobi Ghat (2010), Gully Boy (2019)," she says, "They have already shown the beauty and at the same time, the miseries of Mumbai. So, I was thought, ‘What the hell am I going to make?'"

Anuparna Roy

Instead, she chose not to make Mumbai the spectacle. "We didn't showcase the Dharavi chawl," she says, "We were basically chasing the characters, and through these characters, whatever Mumbai we are getting to see."

Karim, who discovers he is gay, is "definitely alone". Amina's loneliness is different. "Amina wanted to be touched and wanted to be loved and wanted to be seen and heard by a man," Roy says.

The other couple - Sukka and Pinky - leave their village because of caste. The new obstacle is that Pinky is pregnant before the wedding.

"I showcased how men or the system of men created their own burdens," she says.

She deliberately keeps herself at a distance from her characters. "I don't know if I have reached the same level of empathy… Or I might be another failure. As a human," she says.

Now, as the film travels from Venice to Busan, Roy is still approaching cinema as a student. "I'm still struggling. I'm still a student of cinema," she says. For now, though, she is allowing herself to enjoy the dream. At Venice, the film received a seven- to eight-minute standing ovation. "I was shaking," she says, "I was about to cry."