Anuparna Roy is returning to the Venice Film Festival in 2026 with her second feature, Lovers in the Blue Night, bringing a deeply personal story of migrants, desire, loneliness and belonging back to the Lido. The return comes just a year after Roy made history by winning the Orizzonti Best Director award for her debut, Songs of Forgotten Trees, becoming the first Indian filmmaker to receive the honour. Her latest film now places Mumbai and its migrant communities at the centre of another intimate story, making her return to Venice an important moment for Indian independent cinema.
Set in Mumbai, Lovers in the Blue Night follows four migrants whose lives become connected through loneliness, desire and their search for acceptance. At the heart of the story are Ameena and Karim, a couple whose relationship carries a secret that slowly reveals the complicated ways people create lives around social expectations. The film also brings in Sukka and Omran, two other characters whose experiences add different layers to the story. Together, they form a portrait of people trying to find connection while living on the margins of a huge and constantly moving city.
The emotional foundation of the film, however, comes from a memory Roy carried from childhood. Growing up in Purulia, West Bengal, she knew a domestic helper named Ameena who worked at her granduncle’s home. Ameena was married to a man named Karim, but as a child, Roy noticed that the couple appeared distant from each other. Years later, she came to understand that Karim was a closeted gay man who had entered the marriage in part because of the pressure to fit into society. That discovery stayed with her and eventually became the starting point for the fictional world of Lovers in the Blue Night.
The film transforms that memory into a wider story about people whose private desires often clash with the roles society expects them to play. Ameena, lonely and looking for affection, becomes drawn to anonymous love letters. She believes that Omran, the pimp at her workplace, is the person writing them and begins to develop feelings for him. What follows is not simply a story about mistaken identity. Ameena’s belief creates an unexpected emotional connection with Omran, who is also dealing with his own loneliness and isolation.
That idea of connection becomes even more meaningful because of who these characters are and where they come from. The film focuses on Sylheti-speaking Bangladeshi migrants living in Mumbai, allowing Roy to look closely at the experience of people who can feel displaced in more than one way. Their struggles involve survival, identity, belonging and the constant pressure of being watched or judged. Mumbai becomes more than a backdrop; it is a city that offers possibilities while also making it difficult for vulnerable people to feel secure.
Through these characters, Roy brings together several forms of displacement without losing sight of their individual emotions. Migration, sexuality, caste, class, desire and loneliness exist alongside ordinary hopes for love and acceptance. The film does not treat its characters simply as symbols of larger social issues. Instead, their personal relationships make those issues feel immediate and human.
For Roy, the journey from a childhood observation in Purulia to a Venice selection shows how a small, deeply personal memory can grow into a much larger cinematic story. After the international recognition of Songs of Forgotten Trees, her return to the Lido with Lovers in the Blue Night continues her focus on people searching for identity and belonging. This time, that search unfolds across Mumbai, where love, displacement and desire meet in lives that are rarely seen at the centre of the city’s story.
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