Anuparna Roy is headed back to the Venice Film Festival's Orizzonti section for the second year running, and this time she isn't scrambling for words at the mic.

In 2025, the 28-year-old became the first Indian filmmaker to claim the Orizzonti Best Director prize, for her debut Songs of the Forgotten Trees, a story about a migrant actress and part-time sex worker sharing a rented Mumbai flat. She forgot her acceptance speech that night and used the moment instead to call for an end to the genocide in Gaza. It's the kind of instinct that seems to run through everything she makes.

This year's entry, Lovers in the Blue Night, follows four people getting by on the margins of Mumbai: a closeted gay husband named Karim, his wife Ameena, a small-time thief who also does party work, and a pimp who runs a bar lit up like something out of a Wong Kar-wai frame. Roy has said she drew on Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang for the bar's mirrored lighting and its long corridors, treating the space almost like a character in its own right.

She was deliberate about one thing in particular. No dancing girls shot for effect, no titillation. "I want to get rid of the 'male gaze' in my film," she has said, adding that what happens inside the bar stays mostly implied, with fictional hotline cabins standing in for anything more explicit.

From Purulia to the red carpet

Roy's own road to Venice runs through a village called Narayanpur in Bengal's Purulia district, which she left three years ago rather than go through with an arranged marriage her family had lined up. She worked call-centre jobs in Mumbai before teaching herself filmmaking.

Ameena, the bonded labourer stuck in an unhappy marriage back home, is where Roy says she built out the emotional core of the new film, giving her and Karim an imagined escape route to the city. Roy calls it her responsibility to put people like this on screen, and she has said flatly that she can't keep her politics separate from her cinema. "My character Karim killing rats is as political as kissing a guy," she has said.

Family, caste and an old friendship left behind in Bengal all feed into her writing too, threads she has explored more directly in Songs of the Forgotten Trees.

Lovers in the Blue Night doesn't stop at Venice. Roy will also sit on the jury at the Busan International Film Festival in October, where the film gets its Asian premiere in the festival's Window on Asian Cinema strand, an unusual double role for a director still building out just her second feature.