Three years ago, Anuparna Roy, 28, fled the trappings of an impending marriage, and left Narayanpur, her village in West Bengal’s Purulia, to go study and work in call centres in Mumbai. The city now serves as the cinematic canvas for the self-taught director- screenwriter’s personal stories of migration and loss.If her 2025 debut feature, Songs of the Forgotten Trees (which travelled to the Venice International Film Festival), follows a migrant aspiring actress and part-time sex worker sharing a rented Mumbai apartment and forming an intimate bond, this year’s Lovers in the Blue Night traces the entangled lives of four migrants on the city’s margins: a closeted gay husband, his lonely wife, a thief and a pimp.As a more self-assured Roy returns to the world’s oldest film festival in a consecutive year, she remains the first Indian to win the Best Director award in the Orizzonti segment. She’ll be a jury member at Busan International Film Festival in October.Personal is politicalIn her sophomore, Roy builds on the story of Amina, who was a bonded labourer at her Narayanpur home, and whose husband Karim was a closeted gay man, and gives them an imaginary escape to Mumbai. She calls it her “responsibility” to platform marginalised stories in films.“I’m a woman from a third world country. I can’t keep cinema and politics separate. For me, losing my friend was political. Leaving my house and becoming a migrant was political. My character Karim killing rats is as political as kissing a guy,” says Roy. If films like Roma, The Color of Pomegranates, The Zone of Interest, Moonlight, Manta Ray, and Hot Milk can “talk about the sociopolitical situation of their countries, why can’t we?” she says. After all, party politics has “done nothing for Bengal’s women”.Lens on migrationA young Roy used to be mesmerised by the river imagery her grandmother conjured up in tales. Only to realise years later that like herself, her grandmother too was never allowed to cross her village’s border to go see a river or nature’s beauty. For Roy, these stories became her ammunition to flee, and the river, a recurring motif in her films. “The conflicts my father and I share are good. If that gets resolved, I won’t be able to make films,” she says.Though she wasn’t allowed to step out as a child, the outside world came to her through Ritwik Ghatak’s and Satyajit Ray’s films on television. Roy is amused by how her Wikipedia entry “claims” that Ghatak gave her her name; the filmmaker died before Roy was born. The themes of migration and loss, however, connect their cinema. Even as her family still clings to the idea of an undivided Bengal, she says, “Migration is very much political to me. And interstate migrations are not hyped or discussed.” In Lovers..., the theme is also underscored through linguistic diversity: Gujarati Hindi, Jalgaon Marathi and the disappearing Sylheti Bengali.Filming queer complexityRoy’s films have always had male producers. “I didn’t get approached by female producers, which is sad,” she says, adding, “I don’t like to chase producers. If I don’t get one, I’m going to work hard and make my own film.”Producer Vikas Kumar, of Khan & Kumar Media, calls Roy jhujharu, loosely translated as soldier-like. Producer Romil Modi (casting director on All We Imagine as Light, Laapataa Ladies) recalls Roy’s message to him in 2023, to pitch Songs of the Forgotten Trees to Kiran Rao: “I’m not an actor. Please talk to me.”It’s the same team this time, along with co-producer Neeraj Churi [Sundance-winning Sabar Bonda], plus a few more producers. Churi is bringing his experience of shepherding queer films through the international festival and distribution spaces to Lovers…“What’s particularly beautiful about the film is the world in which its queer characters exist. These are working-class characters who may not necessarily have the vocabulary, agency or privilege to ‘come out’ in the way we have become accustomed to seeing queer lives represented in cinema,” he says.Only three more films?Kumar and Sharib Khan (of Khan & Kumar Media) chose not to watch the final cut; they watched the film on Friday with the audience in Venice. “Once we sign on a project, we don’t meddle with the creative team,” says Khan. The duo will likely back Roy’s next.Meanwhile, Roy says she has just two or three more films in her — including a prequel to Songs of the Forgotten Trees and a period film about the 1932 Poona Pact set in Bengal. “Then, I’ll sign off, unless something personal and big happens. If I were to make a lot films, then I’m going to make nonsense,” she concludes with a laugh.