When Anuparna Roy accepted the Orizzonti Award for her debut film Songs of Forgotten Trees in Venice earlier this month, she'd forged a victory that's rare for most women of her background.
Trembling with joy and unable to hold back tears, Roy's visceral display of emotion on stage demonstrated how big the moment was - scripting history as the first Indian director to win in a category specially devoted to new voices in independent world cinema.
That itself is a towering achievement, but Roy's grassroots origins in a nondescript tribal village in West Bengal state's Purulia district - thousands of miles from Venice's glamorous palazzos - makes her triumph even more meaningful.
From Ritwik Ghatak to Satyajit Ray to Mrinal Sen, Bengal has produced many globally celebrated auteurs. But unlike them, Roy, 31, grew up far away from the elite cultural influences of Kolkata, taking a path more well-worn by small-town Indians - a college degree followed by a call-centre job.
It was an escape route from the pressures of marrying and a means to economic stability, Roy told me over a Zoom chat. But it ended up becoming much more.
While peddling IT software in Delhi, a chance meeting with film students triggered a love affair with cinema, and Roy saved every penny earned over the next six years to self-fund her debut short Run to the River.
After moving to Mumbai a few years later, she tracked down Ranjan Singh, the lead producer of Songs of Forgotten Trees, at a party and asked him bluntly: Sir, would you like to produce a third-world film?
Taken aback by her boldness, Singh asked Roy to meet him the following day and narrate the idea in less than 10 minutes. The meeting lasted well over a few hours, and within days he had agreed to fund the project.
A hardcore fan of director Anurag Kashyap's operatic crime-drama Gangs of Wasseypur, Roy persuaded Singh to show the film to Kashyap, who ended up backing it.
Set in the pulsating heart of Mumbai, Songs of Forgotten Trees tells the story of two women from entirely different worlds - Thooya, an aspiring actress who moonlights as an escort, and Swetha, a fellow migrant with a call centre job. They live together in the upscale apartment of Thooya's sugar daddy.
What begins as a living arrangement quickly transforms into an intimate relationship between the two women as they navigate same-sex desire and shared experiences of marginality and survival in an urban sprawl.
The Hollywood Reporter called the film an anguished portrait of what it takes for women to survive, and a clear-eyed, restrained, moving story of two young women finding solace in each other.
Another review praised Roy for exploring urban alienation with remarkable subtlety, lauding her deliberately slow, observational style, allowing the characters' emotional terrain to emerge with clarity.
Roy consciously decided to not follow traditional rules of filmmaking with long, mid, and close shots and instead, capture the rhythms of her characters' daily routine authentically with continuous takes.
It’s a deeply personal project for Roy, initially intended as a documentary, with central characters inspired by the lives of her grandmother and her stepdaughter, who shared a platonic but intimate relationship. Another character is based on Roy's childhood friend from the Dalit community who faced societal pressures.
On her big day at Venice, wearing a saree adorned with the colors of the Palestinian flag, Roy used her platform to advocate for the children of Gaza. Despite criticism, she stands by her convictions: I will use my voice to talk about everything that makes us uncomfortable. Next on her agenda are sequels to Songs of Forgotten Trees. But will she ever make a commercial film? Her answer is a firm no: I can't make sugar-coated cinema. I have to make films that represent the world we live in, even if they upset people.
