Anuparna Roy Returns to Venice, the Only Indian Film in Competition

Anuparna Roy will compete at the 83rd Venice Film Festival with her second feature, Lovers in the Blue Night, the only Indian film selected for the Orizzonti competition this year. The festival runs from 2 to 12 September.

A year ago, her debut Songs of Forgotten Trees, presented by Anurag Kashyap, won the Orizzonti Best Director award, making her the first Indian filmmaker to take that prize. It went on to screen at BFI London's Sutherland Award strand, win a Fipresci best screenplay prize, and travel to Hong Kong, Cork and Lisbon. Two features, two consecutive Venice competition selections, is a run only a handful of directors from any country manage.

Lovers in the Blue Night is set on the margins of Mumbai and follows four migrants, a gay husband, his wife working in a bar, a thief and a pimp, whose lives converge around love, survival and longing. Roy wrote and directed it, produced again by Vikas Kumar and Sharib Khan of Khan & Kumar Media.

This is festival cinema rather than box office cinema, and the two rarely share a headline on this board. But an Indian director building this kind of international standing, two years running, at one of the three festivals that actually shape a career, is trade news in its own right.